How Do You Know If You’re Healing?

When you’re grieving, it may feel like you’re in a long gray tunnel that you’ll never get through. It’s depressing, lonely, exhausting and feels endless.

It’s difficult to see the light. It can be frightening to think that you’ll never get through… that your life will remain in the gray.

If you allow yourself to grieve, you will heal. Life, as you knew it, will be changed forever but you will get through. You will have a newly defined life, one that you never asked for, one that you never imagined. This new life can again bring happiness, joy and peace.

How do you know if you’re healing?

HOPE Group Members Speak – Jean

The mission of HOPE Connection is to help people whose lives have been touched by the death of a loved one – by providing individual and group support, educational programs and information that helps  alleviate the pain of grief and promote healing. In this series of videos, Group Members share what HOPE Connection has meant to them.

The Blindfold

The children tied a blindfold around his head. He was spun around and around, his sense of direction befuddled. He didn’t know which way to turn. Come and play, they call to him. But how? The blindfold obscures all, forcing him to encounter a world infused with uncertainty. So too for me, the loss of my spouse spun my world around leaving…

HOPE Group Members Speak: Sandra

Surviving Grief Through Self Care, Self Compassion & Self Love

When you’re living your life, you go about your normal routine as usual. Then when someone you love dies, surviving grief can feel like you’ve been transported onto a Ferris wheel in the middle of a lake. When you’re up high, you feel like you’re on top of things and have some measure of control. As you descend, your view and perspective changes. So do your emotions and your coping strategies. As you gain momentum plunging downward, you can feel an unraveling dread and a rise in panic. Suddenly, you’re totally submerged in deep water, much longer than you care to be, struggling for your very breath. Then the realization hits you. You’re drowning and you don’t know what to do. You don’t even know how to breathe anymore… You are at a total loss.

Initially in grief, you can have many people around you such as family, friends, neighbors and coworkers. If you join a bereavement group, you may also have the understanding and support of the members. However, during times of intense pain, it’s necessary to learn to rely on yourself.

The following are three “Self” resources that can help you during this difficult time of grieving:

Finding Meaning After The Loss Of A Parent

Losing a parent can be one of the most traumatic events that an adult will go through. It can also present a rare opportunity for potent changes in life. When we lose a parent one of the ways we heal is by finding benefits and gifts that come out of a traumatic loss and the healing process. Often, this requires that we…

HOPE Group Members Speak: Jess

New Beginnings Group Forming

The HOPE Connection Group, New Beginnings, is an ongoing personal growth support group for people who have attended the two-year bereavement program and are now two years or more past the date of their loss. This group meets the 2nd and 4th Thursdays at Valley Beth Shalom and the 2nd and 4th Tuesdays at Wilshire Temple. In order to have a healthy group, we…

The Path Ahead

January 16, 2016
Michael Linsk
First Person, The Arts

It has been said we observe life as if walking backwards, a vision of our past in clear focus while our future remains an enigma. Yet, on a path through a forest glen all of our senses are aware. Sunlight warms our skin, sounds and smells emanating from throughout our sphere fill our senses. If we but look we see everything…

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to all our friends from HOPE Connection! The words from this blessing read:A New Year’s BlessingMay God make your year a happy one!Not by shielding you from all sorrows and pain, But by strengthening you to bear it, as it comes;Not by making your path easy,But by making you sturdy to travel any path;Not by taking hardships from you,But by…