Healing After Loss: Daily Meditations For Worki...

This paperback book containing daily meditations offers continuous support to anyone navigating the grief process. It is a comforting daily companion during all stages of grief. Grief often feels overwhelming and our ability to concentrate at times is compromised. Healing After Loss keeps this in mind by offering poignant reflections in small digestible pieces. This book offers a daily quotation, a one paragraph or page reflection on the passage and finally a statement encouraging the reader to put the reflection into action that day.

Even people who are shamelessly panhandling and ARE truly just after cash for dope really aren't shameless. They have a story, too. One guy told me his story of standing by the highway exit asking for money when someone callously shouted, "Get a job!" He was telling me, "I am looking for a job every day. I go down to the temp agencies, I fill out applications. It's hard." He wasn't proud of his addiction -- at the same time he had trouble stopping or we wouldn't have been helping him at our detox center. I think deep down, individuals struggling under addiction really do not want to be where they are. No one wants to stay there in poverty, neither in pain nor fleeting numbness. People want to have a happy life. Shaming someone by suggesting to "find employment" is no solution and isn't meant to be by the speaker. If you're the one saying it, it's just your way of inflating your own ego and voicing your disapproval of a total stranger whose story you don't care to know.

Janis came on a Cancer Help Program retreat with ovarian cancer. She had experienced repeated sexual abuse during childhood with her father. She had not been able to tell anyone about the experience. She had made several efforts to tell her mother who denied that it was possible and threatened to punish her if she repeated the story. There are no scientific studies that can tell us whether the abuse was related to her cancer, but the important point for healing work was that she attributed her ovarian cancer in part to the experience with her father. During the course of the week, as she entered states of nonordinary consciousness through the repeated daily sessions of meditation and yoga, she experienced more deeply than she had before the memories of the abuse and her sense of how the ovarian cancer was a kind of repetition of the abuse. As she explored this great tragedy in her life, the experience of living with cancer began to shift. Precisely because she was able to put together memories and feelings and words, and to link these experiences deeply, an emotional healing took place in the face of the tragedy.

An experience like cancer tends to mobilize both the supportive and the negative potential in the social networks that surround each of us. The skill is in recognizing how critical relationship questions, positive or negative, can be in the face of cancer. Often help can be brought to bear by friends in ways that can transform the quality of life. Some clinicians and researchers would hypothesize, for reasons we have discussed, that the healing power of community may affect the course of the illness as well. Recall the studies reported in chapter 10, that people who have supportive networks have less mortality from all causes than those who do not, and specifically that women with metastatic breast cancer and strong social support tend to live longer than women with less support. 781b155fdc