Skills and practices for nurturing yourself through grief and loss so you can fully realise the transformational possibilities in life’s hardest challenges

If you are suffering from a significant loss in the death of a loved one, bad news about your own health, or you’re going through a testing process of transition, you may feel you have plunged into a desolate journey with no end in sight. Even if you are normally a highly skilled and resourceful person, someone who serves and leads others, in grief we are always beginners and, where you are used to being empowered, you may now find yourself floundering. When loss takes your life apart and strips you to the bone, it’s quite common to feel at the mercy of a scary, heart-breaking and all-consuming process, for which you are completely unprepared.

This is an invitation to join me to explore basic understandings, enlightened perspectives and simple practices to give you optimal support through your process of healing and transformation.

The Sitting with Death and Choosing Life Programme started as a personal experience of deep grief, then became an inquiry into how to grieve well, and it has deepened into an exploration of psycho-spiritual healing and the emerging experience of wholeness and well-being, that can occur following times of profound loss.

To learn more please listen to this short audio: Click here to download…

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By participating in this programme you will have the opportunity to:

• Develop skills for co-operating with the transformational power within grief and loss;
• Become active in shaping your healing;
• Face into the heart of your pain where your gifts lie buried, while releasing unnecessary suffering;
• Let go of old, limiting beliefs and habits, and transform loss into new, vibrant life choices.

Even if you are not experiencing a pressing current loss, the skills and framework of this programme will be valuable to anyone who wants to live with more self-love and compassion.

Loss and grief are natural parts of being human

We all lose people we love through separation or death;

We all experience failure and disillusionment and lose sight of cherished dreams;

We all learn, at one time or another, to cope with and manage changes in our bodies, deteriorating health in ourselves and our loved ones;

We all face ageing and the approach of our own dying;

We are all, at times, overwhelmed and broken hearted by unwanted changes in our world, the destruction of nature, wars and social injustice;

And, for those on a conscious spiritual path, losing illusions about the self and throwing off outworn identities is intrinsic to the path, a sign of progress – and very challenging!

Our culture encourages us to avoid grief – and there’s a big cost to this avoidance

It takes time and conscious intent to grieve well. Grief unfolds in its own time and, in our busy western world, there is little understanding of death, dying, loss and grief. Our culture is not very allowing of the grieving process, or of emotions in general, and the need for the quiet introspection healing requires may be judged as self-indulgent. Other than the funeral, we have no cultural rituals to celebrate death as a natural part of the life cycle. Even talking about death is often regarded as morbid and, for many people, the expression of strong emotions is seen as a shameful weakness to be hidden away in private.

Have you ever stopped to wonder what happens to all those strong emotions of grief when you push them aside? Where does all that energy go?

Although grief and loss are natural and inevitable parts of being human, which we all share, sadly, most people don’t have the necessary tools, understandings and support to fully open to grief and move through the process to completion. The consequences of neglecting or avoiding the deeply hurting self are considerable and can even be life threatening. Whenever you attempt to suppress the pain of grieving and turn back the tide of emotions, you contract the body and literally harden the heart. The energy of grief has nowhere to go and becomes trapped and stored in the cells where it silently wreaks havoc with your physical, emotional and mental health. Life involves many losses, and whatever has not been released and completed, piles on top of the last unexamined grief, making it even harder to approach, so you avoid it and stuff it all down even more. Many of the major diseases of our time – heart disease, cancer, diabetes, eating disorders, addictions of all kinds – have their origins in unprocessed emotions and grief. That’s how important this is.

If you are carrying unprocessed grief it is preventing you from embracing life fully and moving forward wholeheartedly to create the life you want.

It doesn’t have to be this way!

Stimulus Materials in the form of e-books and recorded conversations provide vital themes for exploration and inquiry

Healing practitioners share their touching stories of grief, loss and transition along with the solutions that have worked for them and the wisdom they have gathered. These are intended to stimulate and help to focus your exploration; support inquiry and deep reflection; and develop shared understandings and a common language for the challenging process of transition and transformation, encouraging you to connect more fully with your authentic wisdom, inner knowing and unique path.

Soul Sanctuary Circles for Deep Discovery Conversations offer support within community

Imagine how liberating it could be to be part of a group of people who are developing a common language by learning together how to put words to the ever more subtle experiences of the inner world of transition, transformation and the soul journey.

Held monthly online, these Soul Sanctuary Circles offer a safe and intimate space in which you can  connect, explore, gain insight and gather courage.  The intentional group field builds an inspiring energy within which you can deepen into the transformational process and intuit your next steps.

The Sitting with Death and Choosing Life Conversation Circles

6 on-line Circles held over 3 months.

In the three e-books offered to stimulate our inquiry, 18 healing practitioners share their touching stories of grief, loss and transition along with the solutions that have worked for them and the wisdom they have gathered. These are intended to help to focus your exploration; support inquiry and deep reflection; and develop shared understandings and a common language for the challenging process of transition and transformation. My hope is, these Circles and the recorded conversations will help to alleviate some of the painful isolation and suffering of grief and loss and encourage you to connect more fully with your authentic wisdom, inner knowing and unique path. Coming together for conversations in a small group, within a safe and intentional space can:

• Help you to name some of the intense and edgy states of grief and transition and, as we develop a common language, give us all  a more solid ground on which to stand;
• Help to bring death, dying, grief and loss out of the shadows – where fear, avoidance, isolation and shame gather;
• Invite you to embrace them as natural and inevitable aspects of your life, and of every human life, with gifts to offer;
• Create maps of the new and unknown territory we traverse as we heal and transform, so that we may move forward more easily.

Healing Modules Provide Skills and Experiential Practices

Our three healing modules:  Build Your Soul Sanctuary; Become Your Own Best Healer, and Saying Goodbye, provide simple practices to develop essential skills in self-support and self-nurturing. They facilitate your movement through grief and loss to new life by building your transformational muscles, creative power and resilience. They are designed to help you release mental limitations; live fully in your body and open to the flow of life; harness the power of your emotions; make vital shifts in consciousness; experience your wholeness and move with confidence into creating the new.

Build Your Soul Sanctuary

An 8-day Transformational Practice

TO SUPPORT YOUR HEALING, WHOLENESS AND CREATIVE EMPOWERMENT

Wherever you are on this continuum between Sitting with Death (letting go of the past) and Choosing Life (creating a conscious and creative future), your soul sanctuary will provide an inner space for deep discovery, exploration and transformation, where you can:

• Listen deeply within and open to inspiration and guidance;
• Connect more fully with your inner sources of love, wisdom and authentic truth;
• Transform feelings of lack or loneliness into the fullness of connection, solitude, relationship and community;
• Make conscious choices every day on your path to creative mastery;
• Move from the confusion of fragmentation into the clarity of wholeness.

Become Your own Best Healer

A 14 day Transformational Programme:

As a next step after Build Your Soul Sanctuary, for those who wish to go deeper, Become Your Own Best Healer, provides further guided personal inquiry and  experiential practices  to create the best conditions for your healing journey and to support your  creative empowerment.

£77

Saying Goodbye 

A 28 day Transformational Programme

Completion is a vital part of the process of grief, loss, transition and transformation. In this month-long programme, guided practices encourage you to use writing and to create your own rituals so that you can integrate challenging life experiences and complete life chapters.

Stimulus materials: Portrait of a Gentle Man e-book & Dazzlephrenia  e-book

 £77

Hello, I’m Rose Diamond,
Six months ago, if anyone had told me I would be feeling passionate about the transformational possibilities in death, loss and grieving, I would have found that difficult to believe.  But now, after a deep and challenging journey with death over the last two years, I know grieving fully and well holds the key, not only for individual transformation, but for a positive life enhancing shift in our culture. With four decades of experience as a whole person psychotherapist and educator, I work as a Soul Work Guide and hold a space in which you can connect with your own wisdom, healing intelligence and authentic power. 

What I am not offering, what I am offering and who this is for:

I am not offering grief counselling or psychotherapy. I worked as a Gestalt therapist for 25 years and have trained hundreds of counsellors, and I fully endorse the value of these approaches. There are 1-1 coaching sessions included within the healing modules but if you are needing someone to talk with 1-1 over time, then I encourage you to find a local trusted counsellor or therapist who can help.

What I am offering here is support to move through a transformational process which puts you at the centre of your own healing and wholing. This will work best for people on a conscious spiritual path who already have some understanding of the territory of transition and shifting pyscho-spiritual states, and for those who are entering into this often confusing territory.  If you resonate with the language and ideas I am using here, you are probably well suited to this approach.

It seems clear to me, not only are there many of us suffering individual losses, as friends and family members depart life on Earth, but also, we are collectively in a process of transition from old conditioned dysfunctional ways of living, to discovering new ways of being together that honour and celebrate life. This transition is extremely challenging on a psycho-spiritual level as well as on a practical everyday level. It is a process of dying to the old and choosing to create anew and it requires us to live on our growing edge.

Taking time to sit with yourself and grieve well can transform grief into a gift

When you decide to become your own best friend and healer, and meet your grief and losses fully, giving yourself time to accept and integrate them, suffering is transformed into a deepening of the self and an acceptance of what it means to be human. This in turn renders the gifts of love, acceptance, forgiveness, compassion and grace and a renewed and strengthened meaning and purpose.

Imagine how your grieving process might be different if you felt 100% confident that:

• Through times of emotional intensity, the more you sit with yourself, the more you will realise, everything you experience in grief is “normal”, “o.k” and widely shared as part of being human. You are not “crazy”, “sick” or shameful when you feel deeply. In fact, feeling deeply is the key to successful grieving and successful living.
• Grief offers a wonderful opportunity to become more aware of mental patterns that have been limiting you for a lifetime, such as self-criticism and self-doubt, and to transform these into acceptance, forgiveness and compassion.
• As you pay attention to, and learn to trust the deep wisdom and healing power of the self, you become more aware of how you need to nurture yourself to maintain your well-being and you become your own best healer. 
• As you recognise grieving fully is essential for well-being, you develop the skills to move through grief with love and acceptance, taking all the time and rest you need. You begin to co-operate with the process of transformation rather than resisting it. Then your innate wisdom carries you forward toward renewed energy and passion for life.
• Paradoxically, it is when you feel at your most vulnerable, that you start to contact your real strength. During the grieving process, there will be times when you simply don’t recognize yourself. Healing may appear in new and unfamiliar ways but, because you have chosen to fully show up for yourself by sitting with whatever arises in your experience, giving it space and listening deeply to the messages it holds for you, every step you take from now on, will be on a much firmer foundation.
• As you become more skilled at being present with whatever you are experiencing in the grieving process, and able to notice and name ever more subtle emotional states, you breathe fresh air into your experience and open to more enlightened perspectives. Although the journey remains challenging you grow ever more confident that you can and will reach the light at the end of the tunnel.
• Learning the common symptoms of shock and trauma, along with simple practices you can do daily to support yourself, you begin to heal not only from this loss but from all your previous losses.