A good friend left me a comment on my blog post the other day. She said, “Your writing is all about loss and resilience.” I was delighted to feel so “seen.” Not only was that a lovely compliment, it is the heart of my life’s work.
When I was nearing the end of therapy in my forties I literally used to say, “Loss is my issue.” At that point I’d dealt with the death of my mother at 26, the death of my grandmother 8 years later, almost losing my baby daughter to SIDS, the breakup of my first marriage, and finally, the death of my beloved grandfather. Of my little family of onlies, the only elder I had left was my father, and we had never been as close as I would have liked. I understood loss intimately.
In those days I never thought about myself as resilient. I knew I had to be strong to take care of my daughter as a single mom, and to keep my job for our income. I just put one foot in front of the other for as long as it took to come out on the other side of each wave of loss that hit me. I cried a lot and tried to be patient with myself to not rush the process of healing.
I’ve written extensively about all the forces that caused me to undertake my Alexander Technique training. Perhaps the most important thing I learned there was to value my own self-worth and to discover that yes, I am a very resilient person. Inside of me there is a well of strength and purpose that sees me through a crisis. All of my experiences with processing loss have made me sensitive and open to being gentle with similar loss in others.
One of the joys of Alexander Teaching for me is putting my life skills to work in helping others. I see that my strength is in helping people gain resilience for themselves. I help people to sit with loss and fear (it’s constant companion) and learn to trust themselves again. Got a new knee? Let me help you learn to trust how to use it and walk again without old habitual patterns of protecting. Let’s find a way to release fear from your mind and get you back to ease and comfort in your body.
When I was nearing the end of therapy in my forties I literally used to say, “Loss is my issue.” At that point I’d dealt with the death of my mother at 26, the death of my grandmother 8 years later, almost losing my baby daughter to SIDS, the breakup of my first marriage, and finally, the death of my beloved grandfather. Of my little family of onlies, the only elder I had left was my father, and we had never been as close as I would have liked. I understood loss intimately.
In those days I never thought about myself as resilient. I knew I had to be strong to take care of my daughter as a single mom, and to keep my job for our income. I just put one foot in front of the other for as long as it took to come out on the other side of each wave of loss that hit me. I cried a lot and tried to be patient with myself to not rush the process of healing.
I’ve written extensively about all the forces that caused me to undertake my Alexander Technique training. Perhaps the most important thing I learned there was to value my own self-worth and to discover that yes, I am a very resilient person. Inside of me there is a well of strength and purpose that sees me through a crisis. All of my experiences with processing loss have made me sensitive and open to being gentle with similar loss in others.
One of the joys of Alexander Teaching for me is putting my life skills to work in helping others. I see that my strength is in helping people gain resilience for themselves. I help people to sit with loss and fear (it’s constant companion) and learn to trust themselves again. Got a new knee? Let me help you learn to trust how to use it and walk again without old habitual patterns of protecting. Let’s find a way to release fear from your mind and get you back to ease and comfort in your body.
It’s an honor to witness growth and change in people, and to be trusted with the stories of their life experiences. The work I do is an intimate expression of caring, being-with, honoring the individual and what has brought them here, and great joy in discovering a new way of being. If you’d like to explore this path with me, please contact me and we can set up a lesson for you.
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