The holidays are upon us. Memories are heightened during the holidays therefore you tend to create more memories during the holidays than any other time of the year. The traditions, the music, and the celebrations all create memories. All those memories come flooding back when the lights show up, the music starts playing and many of the sights and sounds of the past are replayed in the current. You’ll have many opportunities during this time of year to process through the memories and the emotions associated with those memories. Your reaction to this flood of emotion may be to freeze, flee or ..read more

As human beings we are wired for progress. Whether you recognize it or not, you desire and crave progression. In fact, you crave it so much that you sometimes ignore our progress. “It’s not enough”, you say. But what if it is enough? What if all you need is a reframe, a different way of looking at it? One of the many challenges of grief is the backward feel of it. As soon as a loss occurs you immediately feel crushed under the weight of the pain of loss. The change is so big and drastic that you wonder how you can ever escape out from under the burden of it. Progress seems unlikely and even im ..read more

Cindy’s life was not what she planned for even from the young age of 5 living with abuse. Facing multiple losses throughout her life, including losing her home after a divorce and financially devastating medical bills following her son’s brain tumor diagnosis, Cindy discovered ways to continue to champion herself through the difficult hardships of life.  Despite these traumas, she continued to look for ways to survive. She approached life with a determination to live from a place of knowing that she is worth taking care of and the people she loves are worth fighting for. Cindy Benezra is ..read more

One of the most challenging aspects of grief is its unpredictability. One day you may be feeling like things are improving and the next day you wonder if you’ve made any progress at all.  One week you begin to start feeling a little optimism for the future and the next week you’re sure you will feel terrible and depressed forever. How you think about these ups and downs makes a huge difference in their impact on you.  When you experience the unpredictable, and yet very predictable downs of grief, it is easy to feel extra discouraged and even despair. Your hopes of healing feel dashed ..read more

This week we welcome Krista Isaacson to the podcast. With tremendous faith and hope, she traveled the painful experience of losing her seemingly healthy 2 year old daughter overnight to cancer. She speaks to the overwhelming experience of losing a child, the tremendous impact of having friends and family love and support us in our experience and being open to hear the whisperings of God in the process. Here’s a little more about Krista: Krista M. Isaacson is an award-winning writer, founder and president of the Reality Writers online guild for nonfiction authors, and inspirational speaker. But ..read more

Loss and grief shoots you headlong into disruption. Your life feels shattered in pieces and unrecognizable. But it’s not just your life that feels unrecognizable, it’s you. You feel different. You feel unrecognizable. Loss by death, divorce, or a host of other causes, forces you to interact with life differently. It causes you to question what you believe, how you previously saw things and even who you are.  It sets into motion a period of rebirth because it’s not possible – as much as you wish it was – to go back to the way things were and by extension the way you were. As you move throu ..read more

We all have a tremendous desire to be understood.  Which is interesting because I wonder if we even truly understand ourselves! Creating understanding between people is such a challenge because of the limitations of language. Then you add body language and inflection, and it is all left up to interpretation. The problem is that we can’t fully communicate what we think and feel and that goes out and is interpreted by someone who thinks and feels differently than we do. We really need to give ourselves and others grace in trying to understand each other but that’s so hard to do because of o ..read more

Well-known author C.S. Lewis wrote in his book A Grief Observed, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”  He goes on to the feelings of grief that resemble fear.  Even in the experience of grief feeling like fear it also creates more fear. Grief and fear are emotions that are close in their vibrational quality which is why they so resemble each other in their expression. Yet they are different. In this episode of the podcast we look at grief and fear, how they inform each other and how we can be clear in our separation of the two. In being clear in the separation we have ..read more

In my book Miracles in the Darkness I said, “Happiness is as present and elusive as air. It’s in the process of becoming who we were always meant to be that we discover it, but only if we are paying attention and we know what to look for.” After loss, happiness, which always seems to be right around the corner but we can’t seem to catch up with it, appears to leave all together and hide far away from our view and our access. Why is that? And is there something that can be done about it? In this episode, I’ll explore steps in the pathway to happiness even after loss. Because even though loss is ..read more

Everyone is affected by divorce in one way or another, whether as a spouse, a friend, or the child or family member of divorce. Today on the podcast we welcome divorce coach, Andrea Hipps. Andrea is a wealth of knowledge about the divorce journey from navigating the divorce to rebuilding your life in your new circumstances. In this episode we talk about what to expect along the divorce journey including how others are handling the divorce including your ex-spouse and your kids. Andrea shares a helpful timeline as well as 5 questions you can ask yourself when you feel heightened emotion and ne ..read more