For over twenty years the book, Healing Makes Our Hearts Happy by Richard Katz et al., has inspired me from my bookshelf. The contents of the book have faded in my memory, but the title remains vital and provocative. I bought the book when I was writing my doctoral dissertation on healing in the Ethiopian Church. Last month, while participating in a trance drumming workshop, I was transported back to a remote Ethiopian monastery when I was wrapped in the same shawl I happened to be wearing at the workshop, listening to the dabtaras drumming in Easter morning. After forty days of intense fasting, sleep deprivation, clouds of heady incense, the rhythm of the drum and rocking of the body, the atmosphere was electric. I was a curious and open-minded anthropologist, but spiritually incipient. Transported back to this moment in time through the beat of the drum, I have begun to examine how the seeds sown then, are flourishing now.
And, the title of this book stood out for me, Healing Makes Our Hearts Happy. I recalled how it had helped me understand what I had witnessed in the Ethiopian monastery, and how now, as a Grief Recovery Specialist, I find myself experiencing everyday the mechanics of how healing makes our hearts happy. It has become my work! I also noticed how the experience of loss and the transformation of healing, through the grief recovery method, has also been an enriching of my soul and a maturing of my spirituality.
When I lived in Ethiopia, I met the man who became the father of my firstborn. The pain of the break-up of this relationship and the devastation that followed, brought me to the brink of despair. There were times I thought I might not survive the anguish. At a particularly harrowing juncture in the aftermath of this relationship, I embarked on the grief recovery programme, and the healing I experienced makes my heart sing. It inspires me everyday in the work I do with my clients and, last week, I had the opportunity to share with Tara Nash on the Conscious Grief Series 3 podcast, what the Grief Recovery Method means to me and how it is that healing makes our hearts happy.
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And leave a comment about your experiences of how healing has made your heart happy, or what resonates with you in the conscious grief series.
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