You’re not burned out.
You’re grieving.
Take a walk with me.
When you lose everything, all you're left with is you. That is devastating. It’s also an opening.
No one will tell you to be with your grief. They will try to comfort you or they’ll tell you to get on with it. This is so they don’t have to be with the uncomfortable fact that the people we love will die.
So they offer their condolences. And you smile and say thanks. They tell you to light a candle and try to take a deep breath while your mind is on fire. They say just get up in the morning, brush your teeth, go to work, make dinner, straighten up the house, and keep showing up. So you do all those things. And then you cry yourself to sleep.
Every day you get up and you do your best to close the door on your grief, because nobody taught you how to be with it.
Is this true for you?
Take a walk with me.
This is for you if you've hit a wall. If you can't get out of bed. If you're ready to rage quit by email and kick the trash can on the way out. If swinging wildly between numb or sick or desperately sad seems like the best it’s going to get.
It isn’t.
This is for you if you’re ready to try something other than soldiering on.
Because grief isn’t something to turn from. It’s the only way to who you’re becoming.
I wouldn’t ask you to do this if I hadn’t done it myself.
I was on my hands and knees on the bathroom floor after another grueling events season and I realized this wasn't my idea of success.
My life looked good on paper. But the truth was, I'd lost eight babies in eight years, and my marriage had just ended, in the middle of a pandemic.
I tried to breathe through the back pain and all I could think about was how it all started. Just me and a pair of clippers, knee deep in a snow drift, watching a barn owl fly by. I started a floral business so I could bring something (anything) to life. And, at first that worked.
On the floor? I didn’t care about the business, the money or the success. I wanted to cry, for a long time. And then take a nap.
So I got real with myself. About who I am. About what I want. About what does and does not work for me any more. And the more honest I got, the more I saw that what doesn't work for me had become sewn into the fabric of my survival.
Lose a baby. Get back up. Go to work. Repeat.
Untangling that was going to take more than willpower.
I realized the very last thing I wanted to do was to sit with my grief. Because grief felt suffocating. It felt like an unwelcome stranger. It felt like the air I was breathing. I was sick to death of grief.
Shutting it down felt better. Until it didn’t.
I knew I needed to change my approach. So, I stopped trying to think my way out. I asked for help from skilled people who could teach me how to stay with grief. At first I could do it for twenty seconds. There was a whole lifetime of healing in those seconds. But my therapist couldn’t be with me 24/7, so when I was alone, I went outside. Because outside was the only other place I felt safe to be with the feeling I’d been running from.
I did this for a long time. Go outside, find the feeling, be with it.
Over time, the impulse to turn away loosened. Over time I could name what I was feeling out loud.
Over time the grief stopped taking me over, because I had learned how to walk with it.
I know what it’s like when it all falls apart and I know how to move through it.
READY TO WALK?
Put on your shoes, grab your earbuds and and come outside with me.
Every week I'll send you fifteen minutes of guided audio so you can move grief through your body — one nature walk at a time.
This is not just a walk in the woods. This is the work.
Being with grief when it feels like it’s waiting to take you down is easier said than done. I won’t ask you to do more than you’re ready for. You are in charge here.
We’ll just start with a walk. If that’s all you’ve got, it’s enough.
Then we’ll learn how to be with it. At first it will be a few seconds. That’s ok. One day, you’ll be ready to ask it directly what it’s been trying to tell you all this time.
That’s the opening.
We aren’t healing your grief. It doesn’t want to be healed. We are honoring it. And carefully weaving it back into who you are becoming.
Some of the questions we’ll ask:
✶ How do I grieve without losing myself?
I’m not going to tell you to get over it or let it go or give it time. I’m going to tell you to lean in. And believe me when I say, I know that’s a lot to ask. But, you can’t get to what’s still good about life until you’ve learned how to stay with what’s so painful it takes your breath away. And that? Takes practice. Let’s practice together.
✶ How do I find joy when everything has fallen apart?
On the other side of what you’ve lost is the beauty of how much it meant to you. Sitting with that, when it’s gone, can feel enraging and difficult. But, really being with it? Will keep you from being engulfed. Here’s where we learn to hold the pain while we sing hallelujah. Because you have a life to live. And being alive (really alive) is not a betrayal of what you once had.
✶ How do I live now?
We’re not pretending anything will ever be the same. Or that you haven’t been changed. We’re also not letting grief calcify and take you over. You are learning how to let it move through you. So you can really be in life. You know the way. I am just here to walk with you.
So, who am I?
I’m a writer and a naturalist. I’m someone who’s been leveled by loss. I’m an ICF-certified coach, earning my graduate degree in Transpersonal Counseling at Naropa. When I write about grief, I’m speaking from years of training, research and mentorship. I’m also speaking from the gritty lived work of weaving grief and praise, sorrow and awe through one ordinary day — and then waking up to do it all over again.
Are you ready? Take a walk with me.
Honoring and acknowledging that I live and work on the ancestral homelands of the Quinault, Chehalis, Shoalwater Bay, and Chinook peoples — the original stewards of these rivers, forests, and shores.