On Healing and Grief

More and more I think my job as a “coach,” as someone who accompanies others in their processes, is that of a birth and death doula.

It’s often about witnessing and being with someone in their grief so that those feelings don’t get “buried alive” (to reference Ron Siegel) and come back to haunt them. To help what wasn’t processed or metabolized in the past, and then also to accompany the living process of the moment so it has the proper care, the proper attention, the love it needs to exist.

And then to cease to exist.

Healing doesn’t mean never again feeling distress or grief.

Healing means getting in a better place to allow ourselves to feel all we feel in order to let it through. Healing is just a continuous process of living, of shedding, of cellular autophagy for renewal.