Book recommendation: healing from grief and loss with the Grief Recovery Handbook

It may seem odd to talk about grief recovery in relation to mediumship and intuition development, but grief and incomplete loss come up over and over again in my work.

Consider someone in their late 60s, married to the same partner for more than 40 years, and recently widowed. There’s understandably a lot of grief there and, when I still offered mediumship readings, it’s often why clients initially came to see me.

From what my clients told me, my readings provided a great deal of support and comfort during their grief. Knowing their loved one continues on, in Spirit, and being able to communicate with them, to say what had been left unsaid, was be extremely helpful and healing. For some people, that’s enough. That’s all they need: to know their loved one is still around them and feels the love they share. It’s enough to help them begin to heal and move forward in their lives. That’s one of the many blessings of mediumship.

But, for others, it’s not enough. They get stuck in grief. And no amount of mediumship readings seems to help them move forward. That always breaks my heart, to see someone mired in grief and pain and be unable to help them further.

Or consider someone in their early 30s, ready to take on the task of developing their intuition. But they’ve had a turbulent childhood, or an abusive first marriage, or have struggled with their health. It’s hard for them to hear their intuition and to trust what they’re getting.

Both of these lovely people are dealing with unresolved grief and loss. It’s keeping them from truly living their life. It’s limiting their joy and full experience of life.

The Grief Recovery HandbookEnter The Grief Recovery Handbook.

In this remarkably clear and concise book, authors John W. James and Russell Friedman, take you on a compassionate journey through the concrete steps of addressing your losses and resolving them. They help you open up to what those losses are and how to move through forgiveness (for yourself and others) so that you can feel complete within yourself.

They also provide an enlightening education on grief and how to deal with it in a healthy way. As a society, we largely misunderstand grief and react to it in all sorts of unhelpful ways that don’t help grievers heal. As individuals, we need to examine the beliefs we’ve been fed and that we’ve taken on for ourselves and decide what’s true for us.

Through a series of clearly-communicated steps, the Grief Recovery Handbook helps you realize and resolve the relationships and experiences in your life that are currently incomplete for you. They highly recommend you work with a partner, but you can (and need to) do a lot of the work alone. You can also do most of the work alone and read the final completion letter you’ll be guided to write to a counselor or a trusted friend.

I’m going through the process for myself, looking at all the relationships and circumstances of my own life, and moving through the process. I find it so helpful that I’ll be doing training at the Grief Recovery Institute in June 2018 and becoming certified in their process so I can help other people move forward on their path without the baggage they’ve been lugging around for so long.

If this is a topic that speaks to you, I highly recommend this book and the process within its pages.

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