Healing Touch

December 19 – Healing. What healed you this year? Was it sudden, or a drip-by-drip evolution? How would you like to be healed in 2011?

The hardest part of this past year has been the grief I’ve felt over losing Nana’s house and what that meant for me, but the unexpected grief over losing my mom almost 5 years ago was overwhelming at moments. It came out of the blue. I thought I was long past those feelings. Yes I knew I would always have moments where I missed my mom and her absence from my life was so apparent, but I wasn’t prepared for it to settle inside me so much once I was HERE!

A new friend of mine here in Sacramento lost her husband shortly after we became friends and she had lost her mother earlier this year. I heard that Sunlight Of The Spirit Bookstore was offering a 6 week grief class and I thought it would be good for us to attend. I was thinking I was going for moral support and maybe I might get something out of it as well but she was the one that needed help right? Not me. Or so I thought. Oh how I was wrong.  Julie Interrante was leading this group & she wrote a book called Power of a Broken Open Heart.  The group of women and men there was so supportive. I’d never been to a grief support group before and now I see just how powerful it can be. Julie lead us in some exercises that really helped celebrate who they were and not just focus on what we had lost. I was able to share my thoughts and emotions with people who understood what I was going thru and Julie helped explain to me why some of my experiences of loss stayed with me for so long. It was exactly what I needed at exactly the right time for me and really helped me feel those feelings and move on. It was the perfect healing touch. I’ll always miss my mom, my sister, my father, my grandparents, the house that was such a home to us all, but my loss doesn’t have to define me, rule me, bondage me anymore.