Finding Healing Through Gratitude: Terces Engelhart’s Remarkable Journey

Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity.

My name is Anthony Codispoti and today’s guest is Terces Engelhert. She is the founder or co-founder of several businesses, including Cafe Gratitude, a vegan restaurant founded in 2004 and dedicated to creating a healthier, more vibrant world through plant-based eating, wellness, community, and connection. Cafe Gratitude provides fresh, organic, and locally sourced meals striving to make nourishing food accessible to everyone. Now under her guidance, the organization has been recognized as a socially responsible business and won the Do Good Dozen Award at Yellow Co in 2019. Tiersie is the author of I Am Grateful, a book that reveals how gratitude can shape business and life for the better. Over her career, she has led workshops, written multiple books, and openly shared her personal recovery journey from addiction, abuse, and an eating disorder that has inspired countless individuals to embrace hope. She is the host of the Unreasonably Grateful podcast and she also co-founded Gratius Madre, further spreading her passion for plant-based living. And she is the founder of Mountain Cloud Creamery.

With her focus on wellness and community, Tiersie continues to demonstrate the transformative power of gratitude. Now before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Add Back Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our innovative programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefitsagency.com. Now back to our guest today, the founder of Cafe Gratitude. Tiersie, I appreciate you making the time to share your story today. Thanks, Anthony. Thank you for the invitation. Great to be here with you.

All right. So Tiersie, I feel like we can’t really tell the story of all your different businesses, all the different things that you’re involved in without first going into your earlier struggles that kind of help to inspire the start of these businesses. Where can we start there? Yeah, sure. Happy to. So take us back to the beginning of that.

Okay, great. So I’ll just briefly go through like the childhood that led up to so I’m the youngest of three girls. My father was a career military pilot and I became a competitive swimmer at a young age and then I switched into synchronized swimming, which now I think it’s called artistic swimming before it was an Olympic sport. And yeah, and then when I was 16, I had moved away from home.

I was living with another swimmer’s family out of the area in order to have more opportunity with a better coach and a team. And at that point in my life, I was challenged to manage my weight so that it, you know, we all looked alike, which was a very common thing in sports where like gymnastics, where you’re looking at gymnastics, swimming, where you’re looking at having all the team members look exactly the same. Anyway, and so I had, I didn’t really have weight to lose. I had a lot of muscle. I was young and I tried to lose weight and couldn’t and was accused of not trying and that’s just not who I am.

And that kind of just triggered something to me. And so I quit eating in order to lose weight. Once again, now we know all these years later, how eating disorders work is if you stop eating, it’s very hard to start again.

And it just triggered something in your brain. And so I was early on an anorexic, but there wasn’t really a diagnosis for that back in the 60s. And my father was in the military, like I said, so eventually I was taken to a military doctor. And one thing led to another. And of course, you know, I don’t know how important all the details are, but you know, he I ended up in an abusive situation with him, but I didn’t tell anyone. And so when I finished, I was ended up eventually being hospitalized when I got out of the hospital.

And you can read all of this in my book called Unreasonably Grateful, if you want the whole story. And when I got out of the hospital, I basically joined the airlines and kind of stayed on the run. So I wasn’t healed.

I wasn’t in recovery. There wasn’t any acknowledgement of the addiction that’s associated with eating disorders, anorexia, bulimia, all of those. And so I just lived the next 20 years of my life struggling with the addictive side of an eating disorder, and nobody knew. So I lived this kind of secret existence, which Anthony, you asked me earlier about my name. So 20 years later, I was given this spiritual name, Terci, which is my name. My birth name was Marsha.

And if you look at the way it’s spelled, it spells, if you look at it backwards, it spells secret. And there was a moment in my life, 20 years later, when I was really pursuing more of a spiritual existence and no longer, you know, my daughter had actually, my daughter, I had three children, I had, I was anorexic through all of my births and had various experiences. And my daughter was starting to have similar, I saw in her the experience of her learning to not trust herself. And that was for me just kind of the line in the sand.

I was like, I’m not going to pass this on to her. And that was where I had this spiritual awakening. And I can’t tell people how you get there and how it happens, but you hear people say you hit bottom or there’s lots of other ways. But what there was this moment where how I can describe it as it felt like there was a crack in the facade. So I was definitely living inside of a facade because still no one knew that I was dealing with an eating disorder. And yet I was public, a public figure, and I was driving a pink Cadillac. I was an executive sales director for Mary Kay Cosmetics. I lived on a military base.

I was married with three kids, but my life looked one way, but that was not my experience of my life. And so there was this crack in the facade. And I heard, so it was an audible experience of tell the truth. So I was kind of like, who even cares? 20 years later, I actually am living on the military base where the abuse happened.

20 years earlier, married to somebody who is now in the military. And so I did. And some people believe me, some people didn’t. And that began my journey. And over the course of the next five years or so, those first five years of recovery, I had these four insights or these four spiritual messages that I received. One of them was tell the truth. The second one was stay in the moment. The third one was face your fears.

And the fourth one was open up to love. So if you look at those, it’s telling the truth is the first step. And even today, if something happens and I feel like I’m drifting or I’m less present than I’m committed to being, I look and I can probably find someplace where I’m either not being completely honest or just not speaking up at all, just letting things slip by, even though I have a thought or an opinion or disagreement. And so I go back to just being completely transparent and honest about what my experience is, not assuming that it’s anybody else’s. And then staying in the moment is what happens for what happened for me in early recovery is you look far ahead and you’re kind of paralyzed and you look behind and you’re regretful of the loss and the pain and the suffering that I’ve experienced and that I’ve caused other people.

And so staying in the moment is the only place really where life is. And it’s not easy to be there. And so one of the ways you get there is you face what you’re afraid of.

And that was the next insight was just whatever I’m afraid of, walk right into that. Be honest, stay present, face it, walk through it. And then the last one was open up to love, which was, you know, loving myself, loving other people, forgiving people, forgiving myself. And that’s how I’ve continued to recovery. And this is my 39th year of recovery. So from 16 to 36, I lived an addictive lifestyle. And during that time, I had my children. And from 36 to 75 this year has been my years of recovery.

And in my years of recovery, while the first part of it was probably pretty messy, because you’re not that you’re not, I wasn’t, I can’t say you’re I wasn’t that either mature or aware or wise or whatever it is, you’re just fumbling, you’re just trying to survive the next day, the next day, the next meal. Food’s an interesting addiction because, you know, my personal opinion is we have a society that’s addicted to food. And I remember, I remember having this epiphany early on about what now people are aware of as the conventional diet, the industrial food complex, you know, all of that, I had that epiphany back in the early years.

And, you know, people thought I was crazy. So now all these years later, that’s not true. People actually recognize that there’s poison in our food and we’re poisoning ourselves.

And but how do you, how do you communicate that in a way that doesn’t make you sound like a conspiracy theorist? Exactly. Or just people resist it, right?

People just resist you. So that’s been, you know, the softening, the softening over the years and Cafe Gratitude was my give back. It was, you know, when we hung out the shingle for Cafe Gratitude, it was really, wow, what if people, what if we could take people, you know, in the city of San Francisco, young people, many of them, not well employed or well employable and train them in just keeping their attention on being grateful, no matter what was going on in their life, what would happen. And then, you know, for those of you that are familiar with that, that took off and we expanded and expanded. And anyway, that’s the early years. So that’s what led to the last. Thank you for opening up about all that, Teri.

See, there’s a few things I want to unpack there. First, this, you know, this notion of anorexia being an addiction, you know, for people who haven’t experienced it themselves or haven’t had someone close to them go through it. It may sound at first a little counterintuitive that it’s an addiction because it’s typically you think of an addiction as it’s something I need more of, right? So help us kind of wrap our heads around anorexia as an addiction.

Kind of talk us through that. Well, first of all, if you stay straight anorexic, you’ll die, right? You just die.

You’ll starve to death. And so most people who struggle with anorexia balance it out with bulimia, right? So then you either eat and you, so it’s that balance between it. You don’t eat, you don’t eat, you don’t eat, you binge eat. You don’t eat, you don’t eat, you binge exercise, you eat and you binge exercise, which, you know, can be construed as healthy.

You don’t eat, you don’t eat, you eat, and then you use laxatives or whatever, right? It’s, it’s, it’s that it’s kind of an inability to receive and to be worthy of receiving and being healthy. And it’s a, it’s a mental strategy of manipulation. You’re manipulating yourself, the people around you. Yeah, you’re probably lying. It has all the characteristics of an addiction.

You lie, you hide, you cheat, you steal. Yeah. You’re addicted to sort of this self-destructive process.

Absolutely. And you can’t stop. You want to stop, but you can’t stop. That’s where I say it’s an addiction.

You can’t, you can’t stop it. You know, and sure, there’s lots of, lots more information now about, you know, your body system, the chemistry of your systems out of whack, which impacts your ability to think straight. You know, you have this love, hate relationship with food, with people. You’re probably lying. You made the point that back in the 60s, there really wasn’t a diagnosis for this. No, there wasn’t. So you probably, on some level, understood that you were really struggling with something, but without there being a diagnosis or a name or a way to sort of categorize it, I have to imagine that made it all the more confusing for you.

Very confusing. And it wasn’t until, and I can’t remember the show, but there was some sitcom when I already had children and my kids were watching sitcoms. There was some sitcom where People Magazine did an article about the actress and defined it as an eating disorder. And I heard it and that was the first time I was like, oh, that’s what this is. You know, I, you know, I had all kinds of crazy notions. I thought I was an evil person. I thought there was something wrong with me. I thought, um, yeah, I just lived, like you said, it was confusing and painful and isolating and lonely. And I felt misunderstood.

And I was always masking or covering it up. And then on top of this, when you’re taken to a doctor to try to get some help, and you find yourself in this abusive position, this abusive relationship. And so you’ve got all this other confusing stuff going on. Now you’ve piled on a whole other set of, you don’t even know what to call it.

It sounds like catastrophic sort of, like colliding these two things together. And for so many years, you just carried that with you and sort of stuffed it down inside and let it eat away at your insides. Yep. Yep. And always felt guilty. And, um, yeah, exactly. That’s how it was. It was very isolating.

I told someone once that someone I was coaching or working with who was dealing with a loved one who had an eating disorder. And I said, it’s like there’s those kitchen doors that swing in and out. And you have to be able, if someone outside of you can actually infiltrate the, the barrier, you know, it gives you an opportunity to step out. And the only way they can infiltrate that barrier is to be completely authentic and honest with you. And most people aren’t, you know, everybody’s, everybody has some version of shame that they hide. And as long as that’s happening, they can’t penetrate because you’re, you’re already living in that shame bubble. And you can see it in other people. And so it really takes somebody being completely transparent and honest with you from their perspective, not about you.

And, you know, I don’t know how, you know, that was my situation where it was secret and hidden. But, you know, I’ve read lots of things about now people deal with eating disorders and it’s like people know, and it’s, and that’s another experience. You still, but you still have to be willing to, you know, it’s, it’s part of a whole system. You’re the person who has it, but all the other people in your circle or family of origin play a part in that.

And that’s why people go to recovery homes, maybe in heal a bit, but then they return to the same environment and relapse. You, everybody has to do that part. Everybody has to. So for somebody who has a loved one that is dealing with or recovering from an anorexic, bulimic addiction, what advice can you give them? How to support that person, how to get through to them, how to be there for them?

Well, so first of all, you don’t ever stop loving them. And, you know, I think the hardest part is if there’s been this broken trust, if, you know, they’re lying or cheating or stealing, and there’s been this broken trust, you have to be willing to trust them again. You have to be willing because if we live, Anthony, like, if I live it like I don’t trust you, you’ll eventually be mistrustful.

You just will because I’m creating that atmosphere for you to live in. So you have to be willing to do that. But that takes this person doing a lot of work over here to trust and sure, yeah, they may, they may, they may blow it again. But so what, you’re committed to being somebody who trusts. Now, that doesn’t mean you also have to be completely honest and you have to be completely honest about your experience. So speaking in the first person, my experience, what you’re afraid of, what you’re dealing with, what it’s like for you over there, not so much projecting it on to the other person, but that sort of transparency yourself is vital, necessary in order to even reach that person. And then, you know, I’m a person, I’m a Christian, so you have to pray, you have to believe that there is a power working greater than you that has that best interest of that person at heart. And I don’t know how to, you have to be willing, you have to be willing to believe that this person will, will get through this. And so for your T or C, it sounds like part of sort of your tipping point came when you started to notice some behaviors in your daughter, where she wasn’t trusting herself.

And there was something in that that kind of awakened something in you to say what? That’s not going to happen. Yeah. Yeah, because see, if I had, if I had completely trusted, if I’d felt like I was completely trusted, I would have said something about the abuse. But I didn’t, because I was still taking care of him and his needs.

You know, it’s like, he had a family to protect, he was a professional, he was a male, I mean, all these things. Why would anybody believe me? So not raising a child to not trust their own internal wisdom was like, I’m not going to do that.

I’m not going to do that. And that was, you know, I probably saw in her that part of me that had been not believed. And so I, it was just that it was the impetus that created the opening for. And how long after you sort of had that thought of that realization, did you hear that first voice? Oh, right, right then I went up right at that moment, went upstairs, took a shower, heard the voice.

And then that was the beginning. I did some crazy things. I took all the furniture out of the house.

My husband was deployed to the Indian Ocean at the time. I took the furniture out of the house. I bought a little Walkman started jogging.

You know, I just, that was the beginning of those 20 years, now 39 years of recovery. What was the furniture? Why did you take the furniture? Because I just, because I had this thing, like I don’t want anything in the house that I don’t choose that I don’t want. And if you think about that, you know, symbolic of life, right, of my life, okay, I’m not, I had to learn how to, I had to learn how to feel full, had to learn how to feel hungry, I had to learn how to prepare food for myself. I had, because I was so used to, you know, an abusive relationship with those things.

So I had to kind of start all over. What did the voice sound like? You know, I still hear it. So it’s, it’s like an impression. It’s like, you know, so you always know that it’s this, you know, for me, it’s, it’s God, it’s Jesus. You always know that because I always know that because I know what there’s, I know what’s being said. And I know that’s what I’m supposed to do and I don’t want to. So it, there’s always that defining line of, yeah, I get it.

I know that. And I don’t want to. And yet, that’s what I push up against is, and I, and I already know I’m going to, it’s like that line of, I don’t want to, and I know I’m going to. That’s the, you know, I mean, I’ve obviously studied and read a lot more since then. And I’ve heard, I’ve heard it said that, you know, that, that divine guidance will always move you in the direction of, you know, growth and love and healing and always move you in that direction. But it doesn’t necessarily look like it at the time, because you’re, you’re going to have to just walk through something.

You’re going to have to confront something. But there’s this, there’s this kindness and gentleness and grace that goes with it. And so it’s easy, it’s easy to tell. It’s easy to identify what that is now after all these years.

From the time that you heard the voice the first time, when did those additional messages come through? Face your peers? People have asked me that, but I would say, you know, I definitely worked at Telling the Truth for over a year. So was it like you had to, you had to attain the first one before you got sort of the second or the third? Because it wasn’t like linear time like that for me.

It wasn’t like I knew there was even going to be a second or I knew there was going to be a third. So I was just working on telling the truth. I was just continually working on telling the truth. And at some point I heard it, I heard it again. And, you know, so I didn’t know there’d be a third or a fourth, you know, I didn’t know, I didn’t know those things. I was just committed to, you know, getting healthy.

I was just committed to healing. So, okay, when did you first decide to start Cafe Gratitude then you talked a little bit about what you wanted it to be? Yeah, Cafe Gratitude started years later. So, let’s see here, I met my current husband in 2000. And we got married in 2002. And in 2004, we started Cafe Gratitude. And before that, I had an inspirational greeting card company. I’ve done a lot of different things.

I was a registration manager for landmark education. That’s where I met my husband. And so I was 52 when we got married in 54 when we started Cafe Gratitude.

And we didn’t start it as a restaurant. We were both working in the world of transformation and healing. And he kind of came through the avenue of a hippie from the world. And then we were just friends. And then at some point, he said, I really get, I want to be more than friends with you. And so when we got together as a partner, as a couple, when we got married, we were like, okay, what are we going to do with our life?

We, what are we going to do? And it kind of came that we got this voice, this insight that said to create a board game. And we were like, we don’t even play board games. Like, we don’t even own a board game.

I don’t even necessarily like board games. And so we started looking around because we knew we were in the world of transformation, which is, you know, creating something as possible that you didn’t think was possible before. And so we sat down every day, we had a big blank canvas. And I think we collected a couple pebbles, and we made a little spinner, things that you associate with board games. And we had this big blank canvas. And we just for a year, we said, okay, it’s your turn. What are you going to do? And then he’d go, it’s your turn.

What are you going to do? We invented a board game called the Abounding River. And you can still get it on eBay. And we, I don’t know how many copies we printed eventually. I don’t know, 5,000, we printed a bunch. So we had all these board games. And we were like, well, what are we going to do with these board games? How are we going to get these board games to people? And we had this idea like, well, let’s, you know, Matthew likes coffee.

I’m a really good baker. We lived in San Francisco. Maybe let’s create a little cafe where people come in and play the board game. And I’ll make pastries and you can get the best coffee. And so that was the idea. And then we just kind of started looking around.

Well, where would we put it? And then we went to Hawaii and I kind of got chewed into the plant-based diet. And we came back and we actually started the cafe as a raw food plant-based.

And we got super inspired by that. We were already like doing yoga every day and riding our bikes everywhere. So, so I started making all this, you know, raw food. And so then we thought, well, we started making food for our friends. And then our friends were like, well, when are you going to open up a cafe? And we were like, I don’t know when we, when we get the message to or whatever. And then one day we were on our way back from the farmer’s market and we saw a sign over a building this head restaurant available. And we went home, we looked it up online. And that ended up being the first cafe gratitude.

And so we were like, well, what are we going to call it? And, you know, for me, gratitude was a big part of my healing practice. Gratitude was a part of his life.

And it’s kind of the basis of all transformation, right? It’s, I mean, there wasn’t even a thing like, there weren’t gratitude journals or gratitude. There wasn’t anything like that.

There was no almond milk commercial. There was no iced coffee or there was none of that in 204. And that’s how we opened the restaurant.

We had, we were squeezing hand squeezing almond milk and Brazil nut milk. And anyway, we started this very funky social experiment called cafe gratitude with, you know, 11 people, my son, my oldest son came and helped us open it. And it just took off.

We asked everybody, what are you grateful for? And people were like, you mean like right now? Or we mean like, what a strange question to ask.

Yeah, like when we went to city hall to get our business license, the girl was like, Oh my gosh, imagine if we asked ourselves that every day here at the city hall, it’d be a completely different environment. And, and that was all we did. We had this question of the day in the cafe. And we asked people the question of the day. And the only question of the day was what are you grateful for now?

There’s, I don’t know, hundreds of them. But anyway, we had the board game on every table. And we kind of created bowls instead of plates, which bowls are a thing now.

And it was only because you could fit the bowl in the border of the board game. And eventually, you know, we added rice and quinoa. And that kind of started us moving into some cooked food, rice and quinoa and miso. And then eventually we, and then we started brewing coffee. And then it became more plant based, but not raw. And then, yeah, that’s how it took off right from the beginning. Like, did it truly like, did you did you actually, like when was the point where you’re like, Oh, like this can be a business, like we can make a living from this and open up one cafe, then we open the second. And I think we open the third, then we opened Gracia’s Madre. And Gracia’s Madre was just, we did a lot of work in Mexico. So at the same time, we have a book called The Bounding River, which is a practice in keeping your attention on, you know, being grateful, being that you’re the source of your experience, that whatever you’re experiencing, you’re creating it, being abundant, being generous.

So the qualities besides gratitude. And we, we did that book and we led workshops and we led a lot of workshops and we led workshops in Mexico and we had a connection with a woman in Mexico who kind of brought us into all sorts of we worked with Maristas and the Catholic Church and schools and public workshops. And so we did workshops and what were these workshops about? Pardon, they were all the workshops were all about keeping your attention on qualities, qualities that have you have a great life. And then we also developed other workshops. We have a wrote a book called Kindred Spirit and those workshops are about relationship.

And then we wrote sacred commerce, which is about our model of business. And so when we were in Mexico, I was just so moved by the generosity of the Mexican mother, just the the kindness, the sacrifice, the way they serve. They’re just, it’s stunning. And so Gracia’s Monterey was opened originally to really honor the Latino female. And it was all about thank you, mother. And we had pictures of all the mothers of our employees.

And it was this whole wall of acknowledging them. And we opened it in San Francisco, and now there’s a big, beautiful one in Los Angeles. Still there.

We’ve closed the one that was in Newport. But anyway, so, I mean, it was, I don’t think we ever thought, like, I guess we thought business, but it was more the social experiment of training people using the restaurant as a format. Cause service is a key to every spiritual path. And so it was all about service and teamwork and communication. And we kept leading workshops and- Were there particular pathways for you finding the folks that you wanted to come work with you? Did we have trouble finding them? Were there particular ways that you found these folks? It sounds like you were looking for a specific type of person. We usually told people it’s a bad idea to work for us.

And we had silly questions like, not silly, but different. How do you get in your own way? And yeah, what’s your greatest achievement? We had a unique application process. And then our other, our two other sons came to work with us. And then we ended up with people that wanted to help us move to LA and they became our partners. They’re still our partners. And they took on the LA expansion and our kids went down to open that expansion. And one of them is still there.

One of them has since gone to our daughter’s farm in Texas. And he started, I mean, it’s a, he started a whole another business called Kiss the Ground, which is a, I mean, there’s movies and yeah, it’s a wild story. Anyway. What is Kiss the Ground real quick? I want to keep it about you, but now I gotta know what’s Kiss the Ground is a nonprofit organization that’s promoting regenerative farming. Okay. And he’s definitely a leader in that element, which is now associated with Robert Kennedy and Maha, which he’s a part of.

And yeah. So, and then our other son has since left our company, but he has his own restaurants in Los Angeles. He has highly likely and he’s now opening up in Ohio. And then our daughter, one of our daughters has a 200 acre retreat center outside of Austin in Bandera. And that’s called sovereignty ranch. And yeah. And then one son’s in Santa Cruz and that’s where we had the restaurant that one was about.

One seed, all of these other sort of branches of sprouted off the tree. And our other daughter is a mom in Oakdale, the central valley in California. So tell us what cafe gratitude is today. Pardon? Tell us what cafe gratitude is today.

Somebody goes on to book. Today is still, I mean, we’re actually hoping that there’s kind of a resurgence because of this awareness of how important healthy food is and how destructive the conventional industrial food system is to both the planet and our own biome, our own gut flora. So we’re hoping that there’s kind of a resurgence, but we have the three original Southern California.

So Venice Beach cafe gratitude, large month cafe gratitude and Hollywood, West Hollywood, Gracious Madre are the three restaurants that belong to our group called Love Serve, remember, in Los Angeles. And they’re great. They’re hanging in there. They’re serving a lot of people. It’s not the big huge blowout that it once was, but maybe there’ll be another breath of fresh air.

Who knows? Did COVID kind of affect the trajectory of what was going on in any way? Oh, horribly, horribly.

Yeah. Horribly. Because our restaurants were so much about people and not just food, and because it was about an interactive experience, they were horribly affected because COVID had everybody step away from each other, get six feet away, wear a mask, don’t wear a mask, come in, don’t come in.

I mean, horrible. Hospitality, I mean, there are more closed restaurants. We left San Francisco just because it was so crime-ridden and not clean and not safe.

And yeah, it’s never- But you see a path to maybe some of these, probably not the same exact physical locations, but maybe being able to open up some new locations. Yeah, I really think that we need to go out of state. We need to get out of California. But we’re also all, we’re also all, we’re 20 years in, our partners are 10 years in, we’re also all, all right, we’re ready for the energy to do that. So, we’re looking for some partners that are interested in that kind of expansion, because it takes a lot. We don’t wanna travel like that anymore.

And we know you have to have boots on the ground. And we’re looking for the right people to partner with us and take the restaurants out of state. Any particular states that you think would make a good expansion? I mean, there’s been lots of conversation about places where there isn’t that availability, where there’s a need for good, healthy food. And there obviously has to be a large enough population. So it’s gonna be in some metropolitan or some area surrounding a city. But we’ve talked about Dallas and Houston and Miami and we’ve talked about different places, but we’ll see.

We’ll see. I wanna ask you about one of your books. You mentioned a few of them, Abounding River, Kindred Spirit, Sacred Commerce. You said this is how you approach business. What is this? So it’s a business, it’s a book about the culture of our business and it’s how we treat people, the skills and the tools that we utilize to grow a really strong, healthy community. Our people really stay connected and helpful. Those original people that opened that first Cafe Gratitude are still a very tight-knit group of people.

And if somebody’s in trouble, we all pitch in and help. And how that got created were those tools that are in Sacred Commerce. And that’s the workshop that we ended up leading that workshop probably. Oh, we probably like Kindred Spirit, more relationship, which is where people mostly struggle.

But yeah, it’s about our business model. You mentioned you’ve got some unusual interview questions that you ask when people are coming up. What kind of person are you looking for? Oh, I think we were always looking for someone who, one was willing to serve, was willing to be trained, was that had a passion for growth and developing their potential.

Someone who wanted to be part of a community, someone who saw an opportunity in learning to put service first. Yeah. Yeah. So a few years ago, you left the state of California, you moved to Idaho to start something new.

What is that? Yeah, well, we had built this really beautiful farm outside of San Francisco, between San Francisco and Sacramento. We had a beautiful farm and we ran a hospitality business, say a farm hospitality business. And we didn’t think we were ever gonna move. We’d built a home and our family gathered every year, a couple of times a year and we had room for everybody.

And then we heard about this farm, the person who is running the vegetable business, Emma, she worked with us and she left and then she did a couple of other internships and one of them was here. And I remember looking online and going, wow, that is so beautiful. And then she came back two years later and said the people that owned it were selling it.

And I was like, really? And at the time, the restaurants hadn’t recovered like we’d hoped they would post COVID. And so my husband and I were thinking about, well, maybe the next thing we’ll do is destination hospitality on farms.

And our daughter had bought two underdakers in Texas and we had our farm in Vacaville. And so I said, well, let’s go take a look at this and maybe we’ll add a Northern location where there’s snow and fishing and all that. So we came up to look and then we loved it. And on the way back, we stopped and we drove a camper and on the way back, we stopped in Bend, Oregon. And again, we had the epiphany or the insight that our mission was done in California that we had healed the land. We’d built a beautiful community and it was done. And we were being given a new mission and we were like, really?

Okay. And over that, we started taking the steps and within a year, we were actually here building and we had someone take our farm and we took this farm and it’s been our big project and we’ve built a sauna and a cold plunge and a barn and a dairy and we live in a kind of small cabin that we, it was very much a tear down and we got it and fixed it and we fixed a farmhouse for Emma. And now we’re gonna build an outdoor kitchen and remodel the container we moved in and yep, new project. So is the goal still to turn this into some sort of like a destination? I don’t think we’re gonna do like commercial hospitality. I think we’ll do a few cabins that have short term stay.

And then with 16 grandkids and five kids, there’s kind of people cycling through and we’ll have place for them to stay because there’s not really the room in where we’re living right now. We had a big house in California and yeah, and up here, Raw Dairy is legal and I make cheese and I’m a cheese maker and I love it. So I wanna talk more about Raw Dairy, but first I wanna go back to Bend, Oregon, where you got the message that there was a new mission. What does that message look or sound or feel like? How do you know that there’s a new mission for you? It’s that same thing again, like you’re like you must be kidding.

At the same time that you’re saying you must be kidding, you actually already know that that’s what’s gonna happen. Was it another voice from outside? Yeah, another, yeah, another, all right, okay, all right. I hear you, I get it. And then you’re dealing with yourself. I mean, we had a beautiful farm, like beautiful so much food, pecans, walnuts, grapes.

We were winemakers, we made wine, we had cows, we had chicken, I mean, we had pond, it was so beautiful. And… Tercey, I gotta tell you, I know a lot of people who get stuck in their lives that wish they would hear a voice. That would like, hey, like what’s supposed to be next?

I don’t know, am I supposed to go right or left or completely different direction? I’m not even, but is there any way to like trigger this? That like, hey, I wanna hear the voice. Anthony, what I would say is, I mean, I suppose it’s based in you’re just, you’re available, you’re willing. And the more, obviously I think, the more you take steps towards the guidance you get, the stronger the guidance gets. Like why would guidance continue to guide you if you’re never moving in the direction that it points you? And, fortunately, my husband and I have always been willing to follow that, even though it doesn’t make sense sometimes. Just believing there’s a wisdom wiser than you. So there’s a certain amount of surrender to it all.

I mean, it was big surrender. We left our farm, our realtor said, I’ve never seen anybody do that. We left our farm completely furnished with linens and towels and salt and pepper and ketchup and mustard and furniture.

The people could walk in and take over everything. Things that we loved and liked. And we brought stuff with us, but most of the stuff we brought with us was like the couch so the dogs would still feel like they knew where we were going and photographs. And it was an amazing experience. I went through everything I had, every photograph, everything I had and either gave it away, don’t worry about it. This was like a cleansing of the soul kind of a thing. Like hit the reset button.

Amazing to do it. Yeah, one of my grandkids said, you’re not dying, are you grandma? And I go, no, but at least now I’ve passed things on while I’m still here and aware and can tell you the story of it.

And you’re not digging through my stuff after I’m no longer here. So I was like, was that part of the thinking? Why did you do that kind of sort of purging then? Yeah, it was just like, just let go. I mean, it was a whole new, yep, just let go.

Kind of started over. Okay, so let’s talk about raw milk. America, probably many other countries have been pasteurizing their milk for a long time. Before we talk about pro raw milk, tell me why have we been pasteurizing our milk for so long? Well, I mean, I don’t know.

I can tell you my views on it. I don’t know all the details, but I think the reason that we pasteurize milk is because it’s part of the industrial food system. It’s like, it’s part of not trusting good bacteria and sanitizing everything.

And… The people used to get sick from drinking raw milk. Was that part of the problem? No, they didn’t. And there still aren’t people getting sick from it. I mean, I’m sure people would argue with that, but I mean, I know people would argue with that, but your grandmother, my grandmother, their grandmother, those people were all drinking raw dairy. So the difference is raw dairy has all the bacteria in it.

Good and bad, right? But it also has all the enzymes necessary to digest it. So wait, are you telling me that as a lactose intolerant person, I may be able to drink raw milk? Yeah, yeah.

Okay, continue. Yeah, and part of people being lactose intolerant is you’ve only ever been exposed to pasteurized dairy. And so… So you haven’t had to digest, you know, yeah. And we always tell people, if you’re lactose intolerant, start with small amounts and build up, test it, see how you do, and see what happens. But raw dairy has so many benefits.

But again, if the government’s controlling our food system, it’s not really in their best interest that we’re the healthiest beings that we can be. So what are some of the benefits of raw milk? Well, it has all the probiotics that you need. And so probiotics is a very big industry.

It’s a huge industry. We wouldn’t need that industry because raw dairy has all the probiotics. It’s digestible. Pasteurized milk is actually not even really digestible. It’s kind of a waste product. They add vitamins to it to be able to say vitamin A and vitamin D added to it. The flavor is amazing. It’s really good. It’s a live food.

So it’s the same thing. It’s a live food like in raw food, sprouted seeds, sprouted nuts, those are live foods. So the more you can eat live foods, the more health and nutrition benefits there are because they have vitality to them. So, I mean, just like in the egg world, right? A fertilized egg is much better than an unfertilized egg and all the industrial eggs are not fertilized. Wait, wait, wait, wait. But a fertilized egg means that it’s gonna grow into a chicken, right?

Only if somebody sits on it and keeps it warm for 21 days. Okay, so this is something I’ve never heard of. The raw milk I’m a little bit familiar with. So the eggs that we’re getting from the grocery store, they’re unfertilized. But if I were to eat a fertilized egg, what’s the difference? More nutrition. More nutrition. It’s a better nutrition. It’s a seed, it’s a whole food. It’s, I mean, it has life potential, right?

Because it’s gonna create a chicken if somebody sits on it and keeps it warm for a chicken, sits on it and keeps it warm for 21 days. So it has the potential of life, which is you’re eating what has the potential of life, which is good food for you, healthy food for you. Just like sprouted seeds, whole grains. You know, there’s so many people that are gluten intolerant, but that’s because we’ve manipulated our grains to the point where they’re not edible, they’re not digestible. So they develop an intolerance, but if they go to Europe and they eat their bread, they’re like, well, I’m fine there. Because they have heritage grains.

They have whole grains that have all the benefits to help digest and to grow and to sprout. It’s just a different world. It’s a different, it’s a different diet. So is there a way for someone to know if an egg has been fertilized before they eat it? Well, it would probably say, on the carton, it would probably say, or you go to farmer’s markets and you get eggs from the farmer.

I mean, I would say- And how did they know? I mean, obviously there’s chickens run around, there’s roosters running around, maybe this one got fertilized, maybe it didn’t. If you have roosters, your eggs are fertilized. If there’s a rooster and an egg running, or a chicken, a hen running around together, there’s no chance that it wasn’t fertilized. No, probably not, because it’s like one rooster to 50 or 60 hens. And he’s pretty busy.

Yeah, he’s busy. So, I mean, I would say shop at farmer’s markets, shop at health food stores or natural food stores. There’s a reason why they’re called that. So shop there. Yeah, know your farmer. Get a little garden, grow a little garden. Yeah, eat food sprout. You could make sprouts in your kitchen. Yeah, eat food as close to nature, created it as possible, all the way across the board, everything.

You’re me, you’re all of it. And this is a big part of what you’re trying to introduce in terms of the food at Cafe Gratitude as well? No, Cafe Gratitude’s still a plant-based restaurant, right?

And I still think- Oh, so you’re not gonna get eggs or milk there, obviously. No, and I still think plant-based has a very big place in the marketplace, because I think people who are transitioning from an industrial food diet or conventional food diet, it’s an awesome step. And I think people do need to eat less meat. I do think less dairy, less meat, and start, and I think plant-based is a wonderful bridge to that. I don’t know, my husband’s really good on statistics, but something like there aren’t any third-generation vegans. It’s like we need the full spectrum of a diet, of an omnivore diet.

But it’s also a touchy subject because veganism is like a religion for some people, and we have to all be careful what we get attached to and what we create as an identity. You’re not your diet, you’re not your job. That’s not who you are. It’s a part of who you are, but it’s not all of who you are. And so I think as human beings, we have to always be careful about what we get attached to and are afraid or don’t wanna let go of. And I think sometimes we do it. I think we create identities in order to feel like we belong.

And I think we probably need to look upward and not outward to do that. I wanna go back to the first book that we talked about, Unreasonably Grateful. And as I’ve heard your story, Tercey, I have my own interpretation of why that title was chosen and what it means, but I don’t wanna project.

I wanna hear it from you. Oh, great. Well, that was another insight. I was working with a couple other women, good friends of mine. Actually, the owner of Yellow Co, who did the Do Good Award, that’s how I met her when I got that award.

But I was working with Joanna and Elise, and we were three women who were writing books. And it’s interesting, I gratitude is kind of the core of everything. Gratitude leads to grace, grace leads to God. It’s like, and then I was taking the step beyond being grateful because. So there is being grateful because as like a response to something, but then there’s beginning with being grateful for no reason. You know, like being grateful, but not stimulated by any external stimulation or, and then I just got, oh, that’s like Unreasonably Grateful.

There’s no reason for the gratitude. It’s not mental. It’s not, I’m reasoning myself into it.

No, it’s like being grateful as the starting place because that’s who I am. And that’s where that came from. Can I share with you kind of where my thought process was?

Yeah, I’d love to hear. Kind of even more extreme because of the severe challenges that you went through. And for you to write a book about all of that, and then entitle it Unreasonably Grateful, it is unreasonable for most people to sit here and think, oh my goodness, what out of all of that could you possibly be grateful for? Oh wow, oh, that’s great. That’s great.

I hadn’t seen that. And then I’ve got the title of the next book, which is Aged Gracefully. And that’s actually gonna be about, I’ve started it, but that’s gonna be about my personal aging and cheese. So cheese is, you know, cheese is an age, to the longer it ages, the more valuable it is. Like you’re gonna pay more for a six year chatter than a three year chatter and then a one year chatter.

So yeah, Aged Gracefully is gonna be the next book. And I just haven’t dedicated enough to, I’ve started it, but I haven’t done that. I’m doing that this year yet.

So we’ll see. I thought you were gonna say Aged Gratefully, which would also fit within your theme, but I’ll be curious to see that book. Grateful and grace are actually the same etymology. It’s the same base word.

Okay. Something else I learned today. So tell us about the Duke Good Award, Tiersie. Oh, that was so sweet. So I didn’t even know about Yellow Co. And then I got this announcement that said I was gonna be up for this Duke Good Award anyway. That’s the first time I went to their convention and I met Joanna and it was sweet. It was so sweet. And it was about, it was people, business owners, who Yellow Co. an organization for women who utilize their business platform to make a positive difference or impact in the world.

Beautiful group of people. And yeah, I got that award, which was amazing. I loved it. And I loved the group. I loved the people I met in the group. And I’ve been involved.

It’s no longer Joanna ended it this year and she started something else. And I loved being a part of it. It was an amazing, an amazing model for a business. And yeah, it was great. Tell us about your own podcast.

Same name as the book we were just discussing, the Unreasonably Great for Podcast. It’s interesting because I only started that because we were cut off from each other during COVID. And I started it because people, I actually was at a Yellow Co. conference or actually it was a retreat at our farm. And I sat in a circle with women and I had this experience of seeing how amazing and beautiful and talented these women were. And yet they were all struggling with their own view of themselves. And I was like, wow, people, they just need to, they need someone, they need someone who can reflect back to them who they really are. Because I think probably we all have some self judgment, self criticism mechanism running inside of us.

And it doesn’t allow us to see how great and grand we are. And so I had shared with this group of people and they were like, you should do this more. And so I started the podcast, it’s like very short, it’s like five to 10 minutes, it comes out every Sunday. And it’s tidbits of wisdom from my own journey of recovery.

So it’s little things that my, some people may hear and it sparks something in them that just encourages and supports them in taking their next step, moving further along on their own path of discovering who they really are beyond their limited view of themselves. And then on Tuesdays, I offer individual sessions where it’s just like 20 minutes, a few hours in the morning because that’s what works for my schedule. And I have these one-on-one Zoom meetings and really it’s an opportunity to sit as an elder and just reflect back to people what I hear and what I see. And it always, always leaves them feeling inspired and encouraged and grateful. And so I keep doing that.

And that kind of came from that last gathering of Yellow Co at the Fila Farm. So that’s what I do. And I love it. And like I shared with you before we started, I wasn’t planning to do anything different with my podcast, but in 2025, I’ve moved it to Substack and I can see I’m gonna do a couple of different things, but it’s just me. It’s not like this- It’s not an interview style. This is just tier C- It’s just me and I give you- Sharon Nuggets of Wisdom. Yeah, I give you a little tidbits from my 39, years to help encourage and support you.

And because I learned from other people sharing, and so how stingy would it be for me to not share, you know, what I’ve learned in the hopes that someone might hear something that supports them. Tier C, I’ve just got one more question for you, but before I ask it, I wanna do two things. First of all, everyone listening today, I know that you love today’s content. Tier C has been great.

Please hit the share, like or subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. Tier C, I also wanna let people know the best way to get in touch with you. What would that be? So I have a website. It’s called tercienglehart.com.

If you don’t know how to spell Terci, it’s secret backwards. And then Englehart is just like E-N-G-E-L-H-A-R-T. And then my podcast is unreasonably grateful, but you can connect to my podcast through my website as well. And then terci at tercienglehart.com is also my email address. So you can always email me. And yeah, I’d love to hear from you.

That’s great. Last question for you, Terci. Usually I ask this in more of like an industry perspective, but you’ve got your hands on so many different things. I’m just gonna ask what you think the future of Terci looks like over the next couple of years. What are the new things, the new projects, the changes that are in front of us? Well, okay, so I’m learning how to jump rope this year.

So I’m gonna do like a little jump rope trick routine for my 75th birthday. And I came here and said I wanna be known as an artisan cheese maker. I am now, people know me in town and as an artisan cheese maker. And I wanna be, I love being a mentor, a wise woman, someone who’s yeah, contributing to other people. I have a picture that my daughter gave me that’s, you know, like when my life’s over, I wanna be known that I loved well. In the next five years, I’m gonna move from 75 to 80. So I’m committed to being healthy. Yeah, I wanna, yeah, finish building the homestead.

I think gentle, soft, strong, kind, those all work. And yeah, just contributing, leaving a legacy for other people that being a part of creating healthier, happier people in communities. That’s all terrific. Teresia, I wanna be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it. It’s so great, Anthony.

Thank you for the invitation. I don’t even know how you felt me, but I’m grateful you did. Likewise. Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.