grief and loss Archives - THE HUMAN JOURNEY®

February 28, 2023

The Creature Comforts Checklist

This is it our “Creature Comforts Checklist.” It’s an odd name, we know.

We called it that, recognizing that grief is a very physical thing and that sometimes what grievers most need (aside from not being asked if they need anything) is not to talk but to be. Just a creature.

When you’re grieving, you miss the physical presence of the person you lost – the size of their hand in yours, the quality of moistness or warmth that skin held. Your body curls into itself in loss. It’s hard to eat or sleep … or you’re eating or sleeping too much. What you need may not be to talk but to receive physical comforts, which can vary according to the individual, just as learning styles do.

Here's why the Creature Comforts Checklist works:

It frees people who are grieving of the need to find the words.

It helps them get the social support they need in healing – support that is already around them and willing, but confused or shy about where to start.

And it allows those who love them to offer healing care, building relational bonds for the future. Let me know how the Checklist works for your clients, patients, and perhaps even friends!

We'd be happy to send you your own PDF copy of the "CCC" so you can copy the worksheet for use in your practice or give copies of it to a grieving friend.

Photo of Stu Klitsner & Steve McQueen in bowler hats, looking at each other playfully, with a guitar in hand, in The Towering Inferno

End of Life

The Incredible Will to Sing

The will to make it to a loved one’s graduation or wedding, or to the birth of a new baby, somehow compels the body to obey the will. Stu Klitsner was going to sing at his only granddaughter’s wedding, come hell or high water.

November 9, 2023 No Comments

Healing

The Chaplain’s Feet

Chaplains exercise their humanness with every patient or family member they meet. What are the parallels between the kind of presence chaplains bring in the spiritual realm and that of the dancer who sees her choreography and performance as a kind of chaplaincy?

September 29, 2023 No Comments

Group Dynamics

A Vaccine for Loneliness?

Public health has gotten bigger and bigger in recent decades. What was only thought of in the past as individual choices, like drug addiction, gun violence, or smoking crossed over to be thought of by many as social issues and, eventually, as matters of public health. With the Surgeon General’s report that came out in May, 2023, loneliness and isolation may assume their place alongside them as social epidemics.

August 4, 2023 No Comments

Culture

Grief on the Comedy Stage

Is it in supremely bad taste, or potentially healing in a social setting, to use death and dying as material on the American comedy stage? The post-pandemic fad of comedy shows that deal with what have been taboo topics is currently walking that line.

July 14, 2023 No Comments

Anxiety explained visually by illustrator-social worker Lindsay Braman.

Activities & Tools

If You’re a Pro, You Gotta Have a Pro

Lindsay Braman’s example can open your mind about what sorts of both joy and utility you can create, simply by letting your own gifts out of the closet and using them in your work, in recognizing that, if a therapist/doodler can connect two passions, so can you.

June 7, 2023 No Comments

Distressed young woman in bed, with her eyes closed, her hand high on her chest, near her throat, and a pillow on her lap.

February 7, 2023

Beyond “In Through the Nose, Out Through the Mouth”

You’ve seen it a thousand times on television. Just a bit of momentary drama to set the stage. It’s a medical show. Someone is having an anxiety attack. Maybe he’s hyperventilating.

The medical professional or first responder fixes her eyes on this (typically) mouth breather and says emphatically and slowly, “Follow me. Breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth.”

And then, in an exaggerated fashion, the medical professional demonstrates, raising her shoulders with the inhalation and looking all better and grounded on each exhalation, as she tries to get the person in crisis in her office or at a crash scene, school, or hospital to mirror her.

Somehow, within three of these breaths, the person is miraculously back to normal.

Is that all there is?

Breath can do a lot more for you besides anxiety management.

Breath control is the secret sauce of changing your emotional state. You can raise your basic energy level, focus your attention, or even feel more attuned with those around you by the breath pattern you adopt.

Joining in with, or matching, another’s breath rhythm is so powerful that (for better or worse) it’s taught as a sales technique in methods like the controversial Neuro-Linguistic Programming of the 1970s.

When invited during our Conductor training with coming up with a ritual for introducing THE HUMAN JOURNEY® Experience and drawing it to a distinct close, Pam Lewis suggested something she’s used quite a bit in her organizational consulting work in South Africa. Pam invites participants to breathe themselves “into” the circle of participation and then, to demarcate the return to everyday life, to breathe themselves “out” of the circle again. She demonstrated the circular gesture she used to reinforce the direction of breathing, emphasizing breath as our mode of exchange (as it is!) between ourselves and the world around us.

I have enjoyed teaching workshops to teachers and professionals who work with young people with special needs about how to use breath and yoga sequences that specifically either raise energy, focus attention, calm the spirit, or allow us to join with others more smoothly. In their struggle to do what a less-than-adaptive world asks of them, students with special needs, like all of us, can be out of sync with the demands of them.

Think focus, energize, unify as well as calm.

Experiment, and you'll see.

If you start “playing” your breath, you quickly discover that it works a lot like an instrument! Your breath has:

different possibilities for proportions (duration) between inhalations and exhalations
sound and silence (how sounded or noiseless it is–you’ll know what I mean if you sleep next to someone who snores!)
placement in the body (from high in the throat, to middle of the chest, to low in the belly, and even toward the back of the body)
ease and resistance
regularity and erraticness
continuity and stoppage (moments in which you’re neither inhaling nor exhaling)

and

channel, that old “in through the nose and out through the mouth.”

There are other dimensions to breath, of course, as well!

Though I don’t recommend it necessarily, you can give yourself something that mimics aspects of a panic attack by playing with a few of these variables. But you can also go beyond in through the nose, out through the mouth to relax.

Simply by experimenting for yourself with just one of these dimensions of breath, you can bring calm to yourself or to someone else by lengthening the exhalations (even if through the nose), regularizing breathing (offering counted inhales and exhales), or focusing on breathing low into the belly.

The breath is a magnificent instrument for altering our state of being and for connecting us with others, as Pam showed by making breath the centerpiece of her ritual for joining a family prior to taking part in THE HUMAN JOURNEY.

The challenge of using breathing to help others is not what to do with it, but helping people feel comfortable enough socially to deal with its intimate power.

Invite gently.

An intimate experience, THE HUMAN JOURNEY is invitational, never pushing people in difficult circumstances to go beyond their comfort levels (including being as vulnerable as others are evidently willing to be). Rather, it is about creating a space to work with a family or group of people who, possibly stressed, guarded, and isolated from each other, can breathe across the space and find each other again–or perhaps for the first time.

Certification training to conduct THE HUMAN JOURNEY Experience will enable you to bring families and groups facing grief, serious illness, addiction, and other life transitions together. This tool sets them up to carry what they gained from the experience forward, into listening consistently to each other for values, supporting each other through loss and change from whatever each person’s spiritual perspectives may be, and finding meaning through hard times.

We are doing a limited number of public Conductor Trainings during the year.

End of Life