“Welcoming sorrow eases the hardest places within us, allowing them to open and freeing us to once more feel our kinship with the living presence around us.” ~Frances Weller

Most grief support focuses on getting rid of the pain, as if grief is a detour from your normal happy life. These approaches treat grief like something to get rid of as soon as possible. Grief will not go away but it can be integrated. Working with clients to face their grief mindfully has transformed their relationship to their loss.

Grief is not something we truly learn about until we are in the thick of it; even then the support and messages our society gives us are unhelpful to say the least. Grief is personal, contextual, unpredictable, and complex. Unfortunately, if left unaddressed, this pain does not typically go away, and it can often manifest in other ways including through substance addiction, depression, anxiety, and social isolation.

My work with clients emphasizes an approach of turning to grief mindfully, rather than pushing it down in an attempt to move past it. Grief can show up with a “traditional” loss of a loved one but also in many other ways such as life transitions (divorce, infertility, career changes) and collectively as we navigate living in a world with so much destruction and tragedy.