Sometimes you need to take a step back from life and have a conversation with someone you trust. Someone who can listen deeply and put you completely at ease with yourself. Whether you’re stressed out, confused, sick, or sick OF, things can build up and cause problems if you don’t hit pause and rekindle your sense of equilibrium. It’s like suddenly noticing how tight your shoulders are, and knowing that if you don’t get a massage soon, you’ll be in serious pain. You need

Grief begins with an ending. And with that ending, is a beginning we never asked for. We enter a dark tunnel of emotions in which the death of our loved one leaves us, and we grope for some sign of hope. That we’ll survive the pain. That our loved one’s spirit is ok. That there will be some way to live without them in our lives. That the God we believed in before didn’t cause this, either willfully or through neglect. The confusion, on top of everything else, is overwhelming.

a heavy blanket of giant grey cotton balls hangs down from the sky Writing prompt: I know how the sky feels because... This writing prompt can lead you to feelings and insights about your loss that you aren't aware of. Give it a try. I think it might help. For more writing prompts based on haikus that capture the feelings of your journey through grief and loss, I offer you this collection. Writing your way through your pain is comforting as you go, and as a result, healing fo

The flow of ink from your pen doesn't begin or end on the page. I have been asked for several years whether I would work one-on-one with people, and I am ready to say YES. As with my group and online programs, I'll use a technique that includes intuitively guided meditations, writing and art, to lead you into the healing potential of your own words and images. Through this process, you and I will become co-creators of the “medicine" you need to be able to move forward. I have

Synchroncities are such an important part of the healing process when we’re grieving the loss of a loved one. When we can no longer see the person we’ve lost, our senses become heightened to another level of awareness and we perceive a whole different dimension of life. Last night, in the final session of a 4-week workshop in which participants made art to express various aspects of their journey through grief, a synchronous moment came in the form of this sunset. Just prior

When death comes for someone you can’t even imagine letting go of, it is a heartbreaking, soul-crushing experience. No one can prepare you for what you will feel. And what you feel might be so overwhelming and intense, that you do the natural thing - you put a barricade around yourself so no more pain can get in. The thing is, if pain can’t get in, neither can healing. Or love. Or the sweetness of memories. All those things that broke your heart also once gave you the greates

I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. According to hospice workers, that is the #1 regret of the dying. I was reminded of this recently, when I walked into the room of a patient who was upset because his family wanted him to have a risky surgery that offered no real promise of success. He had spent too many hours on the operating table in recent years, and he just didn’t have it in him to undergo one more. When I asked h

When I told her about my word project, she thought for a minute and decided it really wasn’t for her. She wasn’t feeling very well. Her liver was getting bigger, and it was pressing on her other organs, making her very uncomfortable. I asked how long she had been sick. She said her breast cancer had first shown up 15 years ago. She was sad to say it had just returned, and it was now in many other parts of her body, as well. She wasn’t afraid to die, and she sort of wished th

There is no more important time to know (or discover) what you really believe about life and death than when you’re struggling to come through the grief of losing someone important to you. The emotional loss is heartbreaking, and that is the part they refer to when they say that time heals all wounds. And they’re right - it really does. But your beliefs about life and death can either liberate you from grief or keep you stuck there. And when you don’t know what you believe, t

I believe in the power of words to heal. Whether we write them ourselves or they’re written by others; whether they come through poetry, a novel, or a memoir; they give voice to the unfolding stories of our shared human experience. They contain seeds of wisdom, new perspectives, loving guidance, a sense of hope. It is with this belief that I wrote Invisible Ink. I wrote it for myself, to help me find my way through the grief that hit me so deeply when my mom died. I didn’t kn

The first thing I see when I walk into a room on the hospice floor is not normally a bassinet sitting at the foot of a patient’s bed, but that’s how this story begins. A stuffed animal is perched in the patient’s lap, where she sits up in bed looking like a beautiful 40-something biker chick whose ride has mistakenly landed her here. A tattoo made of words, rendered in simple calligraphy, graces her right foot. Her coal black hair is stylishly short and shiny as patent leathe

I met with two clients last week; both of them women in their late 50s who are in the final stages of cancer. Both are confined to bed. Both are grappling with the nearness of death. And each with a different perspective, but with a common theme that I found compelling. My job is to give people a creative way of processing what’s going on for them when we meet. The opening this gives them to express a personal truth is a gift they sometimes don’t get in any other way. Especia