A coach friend of mine always sends emails out to her community with the title “A love letter from my heart to yours”. I know this as I’m on on her mailing list and receive them all.
I’m perhaps not as much as a love letter type person as she is, but today I’m feeling it.
The last few days I have been reflecting, as I do so often, on how very fortunate I am to get to do the work I do.
But without the people I get to work with and share it with I’d just be a lone frustrated nutter muttering to myself, and my imaginary friend, in the corner about healing from grief.
My work is nothing without the clients I have worked with, those I am currently working with, those I will work with, and the peeps who follow my sharings and do the work themselves.
And it isn’t just that I wouldn’t have work to do if no-one else wanted to come talk (and do) healing with me. It’s that the people I work with are the place I learn. They are where I grow and hone my skills, and where I see even more the beauty and depth and change and space that death creates.
Often people recommend books, blogs, articles, podcasts to me about grief. I rarely check them out. I learnt many years ago that’s it’s very rare to find anyone talking about grief who isn’t still peddling some version of the same old story that grief is forever, and you just have to get used to it as best you can. I used to look at everything I was sent. And mostly everything I saw frustrated the living crap out of me. So I stopped.
It isn’t that I think I know it all and wouldn’t benefit from further education or ideas. But ideas from people who havent healed and dont believe in that possibility aren’t useful in any way. A bit like taking health and fitness advice from the unhealthy and out-of-shape – probably not your first stop on the road to health, right? And people’s views on life after death are irrelevant – it doesn’t matter what you believe happens or doesn’t happen. This has zip to do with the healing process.
No, it’s that every single person I work with is my classroom. Every new client brings a new story, with new elements, new difficulties, a different version of grief. And in unpicking that with them I see things I haven’t seen before. Learn things I hadn’t known before. Uncover beauty I hadn’t discovered before. With each person I work with my knowledge, my understanding and my certainty grows. This has always been the case and has never diminished. Each person, each story. each death, and each set of grief dynamic are like fingerprints – and there is new for me every time there.
Those who invite me into their worlds to help them heal are my teachers, my textbooks, my mentors, my classrooms, my university.
So thank you for allowing me to share my words with you. And thank you for teaching me so very much on this incredible journey of life, of death, of grief, of love, of learning. Where the heck would I be without you?!
All my love,
Kristie
xx
