6 apps for meditation
Meditation has plentiful benefits, including stress and anxiety reduction, improved sleep and memory, and even improved blood pressure. It’s also a helpful tool in grief to practice calm and presence. There are lots of resources out there to help with starting a meditation practice, but technology has made it even easier to take those resources on the go.
6 ways to practice self care
Taking care of ourselves is important, especially when we’re dealing with loss. We all have things going on in our lives, and often we don’t make our mental health a priority.
Holiday traditions after loss
From our gray Seattle home, my fiancé and I spent the morning plotting a day full of festive activities for our upcoming Christmas with my family. We exchanged ideas aloud, each one more ridiculous than the next, and I laughed while alternating between quick sips of coffee and jotting down half-serious notes. It had been his idea months back, his response to my misty-eyed recollection of Christmas mornings growing up with my dad, how it was the one time of year he’d come up for air and be present, calm.
The "five stages": updating the paradigm
The idea of The Five Stages of Grief was initially created by a Swiss psychiatrist named Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who worked with people facing terminal illnesses. She introduced the model in her book On Death and Dying in 1969, and it gave words and structure to something that was ambiguous at the time. Soon this became adapted as a way of thinking about grief more generally, and it has since become a commonplace belief.