The Prophecy That Shattered a Family
When a life is irrevocably changed by a prophecy-fulfilled death of a brother, a profound journey toward healing can begin. Holistic health visionary, author, and spiritual seeker Kristina Amelong joins the conversation to share the haunting, true story behind her powerful memoir, What My Brother Knew. She details her path from a childhood marked by abuse and addiction, emerging as an inspiring beacon of healing, reclaiming vibrant health through holistic protocols, soulful introspection, and profound inner work. As the founder of the Optimal Health Network and a senior board member at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, Kristina discusses the sacred lessons of loss and how her transformation serves as a guiding light for those who seek to transmute grief into healing and transform pain into rebirth.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL HEAR ABOUT THINGS LIKE:
- Sharing a personal healing journey can lead to collective healing from unresolved loss.
- Grief is an evolving, communal process. True healing comes from embracing all intense emotions to deepen spiritual connections.
- Overcoming self-destructive paths is driven by a deep internal will, supported by community and structured healing work.
- Profuse, prophetic visions concerning death can occur and unfold with astonishing accuracy.
- The nature of consciousness is eternal. The soul leaves the body, finding a sense of universal love and knowingness.
- The universe “delights in our becoming” as personal growth is an evolutionary process that positively affects all humanity.
- Joy is found in simple, present-moment activities, learning, and fostering profound, healing relationships.
SOME QUESTIONS IRENE ASKS KRISTINA:
- What were the baffling words your 13-year-old brother Jay said that predicted the accident that caused his death?
- What inspired you to overcome addiction and chronic illness, and how did you reclaim your health through natural protocols and spiritual inquiry?
- How does self-compassion provide a vital foundation for recovering from trauma and loss?
- How did writing your book, What My Brother Knew, help you to achieve deeper healing and insight?
- What have you learned comes after death?
- What is your guidance for navigating doubt on the spiritual path?
- Why is healing from grief and other issues so important for each of us?
- Why does the universe delight in our becoming when we find joy?
Discover the healing power of truth and transformation. In What My Brother Knew: A Memoir, by Kristina Amelong, a sister unravels the haunting mystery of her brother’s prophetic death—and her own journey from trauma and addiction to spiritual awakening. This unforgettable true story explores loss, resilience, and the boundless human capacity to heal.
👉 Read it now: What My Brother Knew: A Memoir: https://bookshop.org/a/93249/9781647429089
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The Prophecy That Shattered a Family
I could not be more delighted to have the pleasure of interviewing Kristina Amelong, a Holistic Health Visionary, Author and Spiritual Seeker whose life journey is nothing short of remarkable. Over three decades after the tragic loss of her brother, Jay, who, in a haunting twist, predicted his own death at just thirteen, Kristina set out to uncover the deeper truths behind that loss. What she discovered became the foundation of her powerful memoir, What My Brother Knew.
Despite her working-class upbringing marked by abuse and addiction, Kristina, who is the mother of four children, has emerged as an inspiring beacon of healing. She founded the Optimal Health Network, guiding clients worldwide toward vibrant wellness through natural protocols and profound inner work. She also serves as a Senior Board Member at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, where she helps reweave the human story through spiritual inquiry and evolutionary wisdom. Every Sunday, she offers a Dharma recap as part of the live broadcast, exploring the teachings of Dr. Marc Gafni and the One Mountain Many Paths initiative.
I’m looking forward to talking with Kristina, who’s joining me from Madison, Wisconsin for a powerful conversation about resilience, healing, and awakening. We will explore how she faced the profound challenges of addiction and chronic illness to undergo a remarkable transformation, reclaiming her health through holistic protocols, soulful introspection, and a deep communion with the healing power of nature.
We’ll also discuss the extraordinary story behind Kristina’s brother Jay’s haunting premonition, the sacred lessons his passing imparted, and how writing her memoir, What My Brother Knew, became a gateway to deeper healing and insight. From there, Kristina and I will venture into rich spiritual terrain, asking questions that stir the soul. What lies beyond death? How do we navigate doubt on the spiritual path? What shifts when we choose not to turn away from life’s most difficult truths? What an inspiring guiding light Kristina surely is for those of us who seek to transmute grief into healing and transform pain into rebirth.
Kristina, a warm, heartfelt welcome to the show.
Irene, I’m so excited to be here. This is an honor.
The Prophecy That Shattered a Family: Jay’s Story
You’ve got so much rich experience, so many things that you’ve gone through. I don’t think anyone reading this can’t say, “If Kristina could overcome all those things, maybe I can overcome my thing also.” We’re going to help people to see that they could do that because you have quite a story, girl. Very amazing. Let’s start from the beginning and tell us about your brother Jay and your relationship with him and how your childhood was shadowed, I’m so sorry, by abuse, addiction, and loss, that you went through all that.
Thank you. Now that the book’s been out a little while, I’ve gotten to hear from a lot of people the love story between me and Jay. It’s so interesting because when you lose someone, you have so much grief around it and loss. The book has really allowed me to bring alive that love affair that we had from children into the present.
He was an extraordinary person. Of course, he was a little brother, so he was also annoying and a troublemaker and these kinds of things. As you mentioned, when he was twelve years old, he started talking about, “I’m going to die. I’m going to die young. There’s nothing we can do about it. I’ll be up above my body watching the paramedics try to bring me back to life. It has something to do with the green car. I want to be buried at the Neptune Cemetery in Wisconsin.”
Most people who are buried there were in the 1800s, plot on a hill. He wanted the song Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin played at his funeral. As you learn from reading the book, he was a happy kid. He was outgoing, he was friendly, he was helpful, he was also adventuresome and constantly doing crazy wild things. When he was thirteen and a half, a year and a half after he was started talking about it, he was hit by a car and killed from that.
Was it a green car?
Brother’s Death: When you lose someone, you have so much grief and loss.
It was a green car.
I remember reading that. What about the abuse and addiction and loss in your childhood? Were your parents both addicted people?
My biological father and my stepfather were both pretty intense alcoholics. Not my mother, but my mother was very affected by all of that. I don’t know to what extent Jay experienced a lot of that trauma like I did, because we didn’t have the same biological dad. My mother’s story about the stepfather was that I picked Dick. That was his name, Richard Dick. She would always say, “You picked Dick,” because I was traumatized by her first marriage and the violence that happened in that. I would scream anytime a man would come near her. Supposedly, Jay’s dad, Dick, I didn’t scream. Here I am, 1 or 2 years old, and so she decided to marry this guy.
That makes tons of sense. I can see it was an intense childhood. We know the words that Jay said that predicted the accident and it unfolded exactly as he said it, which was amazing. You never asked him in all that time, “How did you know this,” or anything? He just said it and he kept saying it over and over again.
The Secret Behind the Premonition & LSD: Uncovering the Truth
He told my mother and I that it had something to do with the dream. He had a dream that he saw this accident, this future. That’s what I believed most of my life until I started interviewing people to write the book, because I don’t know how this works for you, but even though I had a felt sense of a lot of details of my life, I didn’t have a lot of very specific memories or as many as I needed to tell the whole story.
You had a painful childhood, so you blank a lot out that way, too.
You do. You blank a lot out, but through therapy, you end up being able to access it again. I started interviewing people and getting in touch with people that he knew. It’s interesting because there’s also a scene in there in the book where I’ve just come back from a Natalie Goldberg writing retreat and I’m on a plane. I started doing contemplative writing and every time I put pen to paper and just started spontaneously writing, Jay would come up all the time and people would say, “You need to write a book about that.”
I was like, “Okay.” Literally, I thought until like 8, 10 years ago that my mother was the only person who knew Jay because his father was dead. I just had so much loss from the divorce that I didn’t have family or siblings who also knew Jay. I really thought, “It’s only my mother and she won’t talk to me about any of this.” I could not get her to talk to me about it.
I’m on the plane, right writing away and the guy next to me, he says, “What are you writing? “Will you read it to me?” I read him this poem that I wrote and he gives me a lot of compliments. He says, “You should write a book about that.” I said, “I’d love to, but I don’t know so many of the stories.” He said, “Let’s make a list.”
It turns out he was an English professor. That was one of those moments of synchronicity. I thought very much like the universe is asking me to write this book and I need to write this book. The first person I said was Dick, my dad, my stepfather, but he’s dead. I started naming my cousins and from there, I got a list of people to talk to. Through the research, I found out that Jay had been doing LSD.
He was twelve when he got this vision. He was doing this at twelve?
That is my understanding. I know it’s really hard to believe that you could be doing that psychoactive drug that takes you on an eight-hour journey and that you would be able to hold that together without getting in trouble or your mother finding out or these sorts of things. I did drugs with Jay, but I never knew that LSD was in our neighborhood. I’ve talked to probably ten people now that said in Madison, Wisconsin in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, it was very easy to get LSD. If you had an older sibling that was part of the campus culture, especially, it would trickle down to the younger kids.
Something about him and his being able to hold all that, because I still don’t understand how you could see your future getting killed by a car and be okay with it. I know you’ve had some of that quality of experience come down to you from God, the cosmos, so maybe you can help educate me. How could a 13-year-old or 12-year-old be so relaxed about dying?
I don’t know if I can absolutely answer that one. I will say that in my story, I was told two months before the accident that Saul was going to go and many lessons would be learned from his death. I pushed it away, but when it actually happened to me, it gave me some comfort. In a way, I got really quickly that this has got to be part of some plan that is above my level right now that is coming down.
I completely believed it because I got the message, I told no one, and it happened two months later. In some way, it helped me with acceptance. It sounds like Jay, it happened to him and it might have felt the same way. It brought her immediately to acceptance, but instead of like me, I kept it to myself and said nothing when I got the message, he was twelve years old and he was telling everybody, “I got this message.” That’s how it feels to me, that it felt like from a higher place and he just accepted it.
In response to your earlier question about did I ask him? No, I just ignored him or told him to shut up or these kinds of things. I wish I could go back.
You were a kid.
I was 15, 16, 17 years old. There you go. I wanted to say to you from listening to your story, and as you know, the book opens with me at the kitchen sink. I thought that was really cool that you got your message at the kitchen sink.
Reclaiming Health: Overcoming Addiction and Chronic Illness
It must be something meditative about washing dishes, because your mind is not really occupied. You’re doing this thing and I guess it’s easier to get in there or something like that. You, meanwhile, fifteen years old, and you have a self-destructive path. You’re getting into drug addiction. You openly admit to reckless sex. You spent much of your young adult years wanting to die. What inspired you to overcome all of this? How did you reclaim your health? You’ve had major health issues.
Thank you. Those are very big questions. I was just in so much pain, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I was suicidal and no one forced me or told me to go. Basically, I started to open up to a hunger to be in the world. I lived in Madison, Wisconsin on the North side and I never knew there was a university, for instance, like a stone’s throw. I started going to college.
I'm totally against canceling people. I'm 100% into always finding the deep threads of forgiveness and love. Share on X
I volunteered at Teen and Crisis Center. At the Teen and Crisis Center, one of the sections that we learned was on alcoholism. I was very actively drinking every day at that point. I went home because, interestingly, at my brother’s funeral, my biological father and my mother got back together. By that time, I was living, again, with my biological father who I had never really lived with in my whole life, who I’m very close to now and I’m going to see. Actually, even though we’re talking about the abuse and the violence around him, he’s one of my best friends now. That is something I feel so proud of.
That’s an indication that a lot of healing has taken place.
I’m not totally against canceling people. I’m 100% into always finding the deep threads of forgiveness and love. Of course, if someone else isn’t wanting to do that, you can’t force them into that. I come home and I tell my dad, “You’re an alcoholic.” He says, “How’d you figure that out?” I said, “I’m working at Briar Patch.” He wasn’t going to do anything about his drinking. I got inspired and then I went to this counselor, this beautiful Jewish woman, one day and she’s like, “Let’s start you on an outpatient program.”
I lasted a week. When I had my appointment for therapy that next week, she put me into inpatient treatment. That really made a big difference to just be put into a place where I could work on my healing. I just went to twelve-step meetings every day. I learned about reevaluation counseling and I’ve just worked on my healing, developing profound healing relationships. You have to have a community around you to help you face all of that.
It’s so amazing that you keep getting to discover yourself and discovering your relationship with this mysterious universe that we live in. All the beauty from having this conversation with you to taking five minutes to stare at those roses behind you. There’s just so much awe and wonder and beauty that can fill the senses.
If we heal our senses, they can be filled.
If they’re not overloaded with pain and grief and resentment.
You had so much trauma and loss. Your vibe must be so different now than it was in those days.
I imagine it is.
I would imagine so. You also reflect on the communal and never-evolving nature of grief, how grief shifts deepen and connects with time. Do you want to talk to our readers about that, what you’ve discovered about that? You’ve grieved a lot of loss.
I’ve had loss around my children, and I’ve had loss with my mother. There’s so much with the pets and the world and what’s going on and everything. I think it’s just that you talk about it, you share about it, and also, you don’t feel like a victim about it. I think that’s a really important part of it. I’m never a victim. I am a co-creator of my life with the cosmos and it’s a concept that James Finley also taught me. He’s a Christian mystic and he studied with Thomas Merton.
What My Brother Knew: A Memoir
He talks about the intersection between trauma and spirituality. This whole thing about just carving yourself out and doing the grief work, really sobbing and raging and not being afraid of the really big feelings in order to find deeper places within yourself so that you’re in deeper, intimate relationships with the mystery and with other people and with your own infinity.
Sounds like it’s called becoming really conscious of what’s going on.
Barbara Marx Hubbard had that phrase, conscious evolution. I think that yes, very much so.
The Healing Power of Memoir: Writing What My Brother Knew
I think people who are reading this and a lot of people in the world are starting to do some conscious evolution. There are shifts going on. Speaking of conscious, let’s talk about your book, What My Brother Knew. It’s a beautiful book. It’s about your life after Jay’s death, what you learned, how it transformed you. The writing of the book helped you achieve deeper healing and insight. Tell us, what did you learn how to transform you and how did it help you to heal?
It’s referencing what I’ve said in part is the new connections I have with so many different people that knew my brother. In my life, there was always so much like you have a divorce, you never, ever talk to that person or those stepchildren ever again. It is just gone. For instance, I had a big Halloween party at my house and there was about 60 people here and 4 of the people, for the first time, because I’ve had these parties before, came and they were my brother’s friends. A bunch of people at the party who have known me for a long time read the book. Suddenly, you have this coming together of my past and my present and all different parts of my life.
You just see and feel the joy that people are experiencing from living this magical story of my whole life and the way that my brother has influenced me and is part of me and now part of all the people who are reading the book. So many of the people that knew my brother who I lost contact with when he died or never knew because they were his friends and I just didn’t know them, they also are saying, “We didn’t get to heal from Jay’s death and have read the book 2, 3, 4 times. I’m now getting to heal in ways that I didn’t get to before.” One thing I have to say is that if you don’t heal, the healing is there to be done. We always have this opportunity to heal things that we haven’t healed from before. It’s so fulfilling to be part of that for other people. That, in turn, helps me heal.
That’s beautiful. There’s also a beautiful story in your book about your efforts to repair your troubled relationship with your mom, who was so grief stricken and terminally ill. Do you want to tell us about that and add anything you’d like everyone to know about your wonderful book?
Thank you. My mom does play a big role in the book. It’s funny, I have some grief coming up right now. My mother was much older when all of this was happening for Jay telling. I think this is the first time I really come to this or felt this. She really wanted to stop it. She had no contact. She had no community. She had no spiritual group. She was raised in a poor working-class neighborhood without much resource and she couldn’t stop it.
She, A, was devastated by losing her son, and B, I think she felt terribly guilty. Also, there’s a story in the book about her mother coming that first night and she was holding onto Jay’s sweatshirt, just gripping it for dear life. Her mother walks right up to her when she comes in the door and rips the sweatshirt out of her hand and says, “You’re going to need to get over this fast.”
Part of an intergenerational attitude towards grief and healing and what we look at and what we don’t look at. Whether it was the depth of her despair and feeling responsible or whether it was the culture she came from, anyone that I talked to, her sisters, her friends, her ex-boyfriends, “Did she talk to you about this even at the time? Did you hold her while she sobbed her heart out about losing her son?” Always, it’s, “No. Your mother wouldn’t talk about this at all.”
She died of COPD, which she started really struggling with in like 2018. Luckily, she transitioned a month before COVID hit. She really wanted to live. She didn’t want to die. She had disowned me, but I was still right there with her because I was not about to lose the opportunity to be with my mother in her last days because it’s such a precious time.
I was with her every day and I was helping her through her process, but there was multiple things that we were trying to do, like see an alternative health practitioner or I got her a beamer mat that she was using, different things like that. We were having a lot of conversations and she really didn’t want to die and she didn’t want to go on morphine because we had heard that as soon as when you’re in hospice and they put you on morphine, that really hurries the transition.
There she was on morphine, which was fine because she was drowning in her own lungs. That’s a horrible experience. I had left to go walk my dogs and a couple of other things and I came back a couple of hours later. The day before, I had arranged to have her sisters there, we played cards and we had a meal. I brought them there because, “Your sister’s dying, we need to all be together.”
I come into the room the next day and she looks at me out of her morphine stupor and she wags her finger and she says, “Stop telling people I’m dying. That’s your thing.” Those were her very last words to me. It was so sad, but I do get to tell this story. She did gift me in that way. She never found death’s gifts that we have a soul, that were infinite.
Signs From Beyond: Post-Death Synchronicities & The Optimal Health Network
You changed the legacy, didn’t you? You’ve definitely changed the legacy. The intergenerational pain, you stopped it.
Thank you.
It went from your grandmother to your mother and it stopped with you. I have a similar story. There’s been a lot of intergenerational pain in my part of my world that stopped that legacy. Good for you. You know what else? Good for your four children. Actually, I first want to talk to you about the signs he gave you. He gave you and your mother some amazing signs. There’s even a story about muddy footprints in a heart on a velour chair that could not have been possible. Where the heck did that come from? Do you want to tell us about some of those signs?
Yeah. Immediately after the first week, there was all sorts of signs. My mom was very clean and so she was very aware of her space. One of the stories is that she had just mopped the kitchen floor not that many hours ago. She heard some ruckus in the kitchen and she went to see what it was. We did live in a neighborhood where we had an open-door policy and it wouldn’t be surprising if kids came in, but there were no kids coming in once Jay died.
She went into the kitchen and there were all these muddy footprints along the floor. That mystery never got solved. Yes, in a velour chair, there was a heart. The pictures would fall off the walls. That was very common. Another story that she tells that happened to her is that she was having a nap. She was actually having a nightmare where she was seeing Jay’s head in the oven. It was terrible.
The dog woke her up barking. She had cleaned Jay’s room and made his bed really tidy. His dog was barking at his bedroom door and she opened the door and the bedspread was all messed up, like someone or something had been jumping on the bed. Bigger things that happened in all these years. For instance, I got chronically ill and in the process of getting well, I decided to be a colon hydro therapist and open up a clinic. One of the first clients that came to me was a guy who had the same name as my brother, Jay Philip, and the same accident as him. He had been hit by a car while riding his bike and he was looking for someone to open a website.
This was in 1998. The internet was just getting going. Most people didn’t think about having a business on the internet. A month before, I had met a woman, giving her a colon hydrotherapy session, and she had the same initials as my brother. Her name was Janet, and she had the same birthday. She was born on September 3rd, 1967, which is also the birthday of Jay. The three of us did what this JP guy, Jay Philip guy, told me to do, which was open up a website called EnemaBag.com and distribute enema equipment all over the world.
I had been trained in colon therapy school that enemas were like the evil enemy of colon hydrotherapy, that they weren’t effective and you should steer away from them. For someone to come to me and say, “Open an enema store,” that was way outside of my potential wheelhouse, but instantly, because of the webmaster woman, while I was giving him a colonic, he told me, “You should open up a website. The name is going to be EnemaBag.com.”
I called up Janet and I said, “Janet, we need to buy the URL EnemaBag.com.” It was available and we did. To this day, we have EnemaBag.com, but I wanted a more holistic health feel to the whole company. Indeed, Optimal Health Network is now a thriving company, a global company, and we help people all over the world heal from all the difficult things.
Spiritual Terrain: What Comes After Death?
I want to ask you some spiritual questions because your life has changed, you’ve transformed, and you’re so well versed in all of this. What have you learned comes after death?
Being chronically ill, and then also being threatened to be killed when I was a baby, I’ve always been pretty afraid of death. It’s been a long journey, like many decades. I do write about this in the book. I got quite close to a woman who had a near-death experience, and I would ask her what happened over and over again. I just wanted to hear the story. I also have a habit of, if I’m out and about and I find someone who’s had a near-death experience, I ask them. I’m filled with stories of what people experience when they die, but then come back to life. It appears that we are continuous with our conscious.
We leave our body suits?
We leave our body suits, but we’re eternal. From there, I don’t know, but the story I tell in the book is all about becoming the universe and having a feeling of being loved and having a knowingness of the whole thing. It seems pretty magical. Certainly, in my life, whether it’s through pain or I have a photography practice where I really get into a deep focus of paying attention to little minute details like the roses or the birds outside or the water, the way it flows, there’s just so much beauty, love, awe and wonder. It seems that our souls just keep going through these transitions. Pain is part of that. Suffering is part of that. Also, violence. I think about stars exploding. All those qualities are very much part of the cosmos and we act them out as the universe embodied.
I’ve heard that too. I know we get life reviews on the other side. You come and you get met where you’ve been in this lifetime, and then you have the opportunity to even learn and heal on the other side. I tell people that for me, I’m not afraid of dying. For me, it’s a passion about keeping myself healthy and enjoying while I’m alive.
What a good job you are doing at that.
Thank you. Tell us what your guidance is for people who are navigating doubt on the spiritual path? They’re just starting out in this world, they’re learning about this, but is this all really true? How do you keep going with it?
I’ve both dove deeply into the metaphysics of all this, but also through the actual physics of this. Quantum physics, entanglement and all of that. I feel pretty confident that it is true because I’ve also looked at the science and the mathematics, but also the direct experience and then listening to other people’s direct experience. I think keep your curiosity wide open and also, let your doubt be part of the journey and face it and feel it.
Sometimes, I have to rage and hit a pillow and yell at God and beg God for solving some problem or giving me some gifts or giving other people blessings. It doesn’t always happen. For me, the synchronicity I talked about with my business, I have phases of a lot of synchronicity and phases of no synchronicities. It’s just the ordinary world. It’s just part of what the whole thing is. We also live in this very solid reality, which isn’t solid at all. We’re constantly living the paradox.
You’re absolutely right. It’s true. I want you to explain to us also our current evolutionary crisis and how your work is helping to guide us through this era of collective transformation, because you’re actively doing this, Kristina. It’s amazing.
Keep your curiosity wide open and also let your doubt be part of the journey–face it and feel it. Share on X
Thank you. I mentioned Barbara Marx Hubbard. I met her and I started working for her. I taught a contemplative writing class for her. Through her, I met Dr. Marc Gafni and the people at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, Ken Wilber and a bunch of other people. They are working on basically trying to synthesize the best of all the wisdom traditions, the religious traditions, the scientific traditions.
They bring forward a story that isn’t a materialistic story that isn’t like Yuval Harari saying we make up reality, we make up stories, nothing’s meaningful, it’s all made up and everything’s material. Really change that story and help people connect to the reality that this isn’t a material world and that is driven by love and eros and mystery and to help bring that into the world.
Through the great library, we’re writing over 100 books and delivering those into culture. One of the books that was just published, Evolution of Love from Quarks to Culture: The Rise of Evolutionary Relationships in Response to the Meta-Crisis. You are like that. I come onto your show and you’re instantly loving me and appreciating me and welcoming me into your life and your heart. We’ve never met before. How do we actually step into having relationships that are like that and not like, “You’re a stranger, I need to be suspicious.”
There are so many elements to it. We do a yearly festival in Europe that I’m a big part of. Every Sunday, we do a live broadcast of One Mountain Many Paths at noon Central Time. We have a board meeting every year in Vermont. We’re doing bi-yearly symposiums at MAPLE, which is a monastery in the Green Mountains in Vermont. Maple stands for the Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth. So many people don’t face their death, so they don’t get the gifts of death. If you don’t face the evolutionary crises we’re facing, whether that’s through AI or extinction events with the animals, insects, etc., you don’t get to think freshly about them.
If you don't face the evolutionary crisis we're facing—whether that's through AI or extinction events with the animals, insects, etc.—you don't get to think freshly about them. Share on X
That’s wonderful, though. You’re really opening people’s minds, giving them new perspectives and then they get to choose if they want to stay with the old thoughts or maybe this is something really great to this. I want to also ask you, because healing is a passion on this show, please explain why refusing to shy away from difficult topics is transformative, because that’s part of healing, and gives us power. Why is healing from grief and other issues so important for each of us?
I wouldn’t have gotten out of my alcoholism if I hadn’t been willing to face difficult things and face the self-hatred and the feeling super afraid of death. I wouldn’t have written the book if I hadn’t been willing to talk about it. Even though my mother said there’s nothing we talk about, being willing to talk about it. I wouldn’t have had this opportunity to meet Jay’s friends and help them heal from the event if I hadn’t have opened up to the pain of my life. It just goes on and on. There’s just more inner life when your inner self isn’t clogged up with resentments, hatred and fears and all of that.
The Kristina Tip for Joy: Why the Universe Delights in Our Becoming
Also, old messages and all that. What is the Kristina tip for finding joy in life and why do you say the universe delights in our becoming when we find joy?
Evolution is the core of the universe. It’s an evolutionary process. Human beings are right there with that. Dr. Marc Gafni told me our growth is the growing of God. If it’s a block universe, which Albert Einstein talked about, and all time is captured in the cosmos, every bit of our growing actually impresses itself on reality and ripples out to every other human being. It’s not just personal, it’s not materialistic. It’s not just you and I now exchanging this and feeling what we feel.
No, it ripples out.
That is very much part of it. What else brings me joy? Studying, learning. I studied the piano. I love playing pickleball. That brings me a lot of joy. Loving people, making relationships, healing relationships, learning about longevity, helping my clients, and walking my dogs. I started birdwatching more, learning about all the birds that come through and the migration.
It sounds to me like you’ve moved from all that trauma and stuff that was holding you down to now with acceptance, non-judgment. Your present moments just sound wonderful. You’re really enjoying that. Kristina, in closing, I want to commend you in so many ways, but also for your well-written and compelling memoir, What My Brother Knew. Your journey from profound adversity to radiant healing has made you a guiding light for those wishing to transmute grief into healing and pain into rebirth. Thank you from my heart for this powerful and enlightening interview. I wish you abundant blessings. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
As I like to say, to be continued. Thank you. A lot of people say that and I credit it to the fact that I have healed so much and I had so much to heal from. I have a lightness about me. I liken it to carrying a backpack around with you all the time that’s filled with all your problems and grudges and all the things that have happened to you. I got to drop my backpack.
Nice. Congratulations.
Thank you very much for that compliment. I really appreciate that and that’s what I credit it to.
You are soaring.
I loved meeting you and all the ways that we’re helping so many people.
Beautiful. All your cells are shimmering.
Guest’s Links:
- Connect with Kristina Amelong on her website
- Connect with Kristina Amelong on Facebook and Instagram
- Kristina Amelon’s YouTube channel
- Check out Kristina Amelong’s book What My Brother Knew
- Order What My Brother Knew on Kristina Amelong’s website
- Optimal Health Network
- Enema Bag
- Book mentioned in this episode Evolution of Love from Quarks to Culture: The Rise of Evolutionary Relationships in Response to the Meta-Crisis
About Kristina Amelong
Kristina Amelong lives on the east side of Madison, Wisconsin, just a few miles from where she grew up. From a working-class childhood filled with abuse, addiction, and loss, she has overcome addiction and chronic illness, raised four children, and founded a successful holistic health business, Optimal Health Network. She has developed natural protocols that have helped thousands heal from a wide range of digestive and other chronic issues. Kristina is the author of What My Brother Knew (She Writes Press, May 27, 2025), an emotional, eye-opening memoir about her journey from loss and abuse to healing and spiritual awakening. Her first book was Ten Days to Optimal Health: A Guide to Nutritional Therapy and Colon Cleansing.
Kristina is also a senior board member for the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, a non-profit organization dedicated to reweaving the human story to guide humanity through the current evolutionary crisis. She has a passion for photography, gardening, backyard chicken raising, and pickleball. She shares her home with three dogs and enjoys spending time with her three grand-dogs, often walking them on frozen lakes every winter.
