Episodes

What does a poet do when she suffers the loss of her father? She writes. Exploring the depths of her relationship with her dad, Naomi Shihab Nye writes with the beauty of love, loss and continuing relationship. Her father wanted them to write a book together, and though this didn't quite happen before his death, he jumps off of every page. His particular viewpoint as an immigrant informs her outlook too and so we are offered a rare poetic view of our culture and the danger of imposing our politi...

Karen Wyatt worked with hospice patients. In the end, they taught her the lessons of dying, but also the lessons of living. Applying those lessons to her own life, she became a fierce advocate for the spiritual importance of facing death so that we can truly live life! Through her book, What Really Matters: 7 Lessons for Living from the Stories of the Dying, and her widely respected End of Life University, Karen Wyatt teaches us how to infuse our lives with meaning and purpose now, and all the w...

In today's world, what have we lost of myth and meaning? Maya and Barry Spector dedicate themselves to exploring the mythic and indigenous practices that once supported us as human being in a community of support and caring. Their writing, poetic offerings and rituals support those they work with to find ways to get back to these ancient traditions and claim our place in the human community. Their unique gifts contribute to a powerful collaboration- each bringing their own poetic expression to t...

Grief touches us at the outer reaches of our experience, challenging us to respond to new and unfamiliar terrain in our own souls. Finding rituals and pathways to carry us through the mysterious territory of loss encourages new ways to look at life and at ourselves. When we encounter a seasoned guide to walk with us through the unfamiliar terrain, grief can become a journey full of meaning. Francis Weller is such a guide, gently encouraging us towards new territory and integrating many Western a...

Throughout the world, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex people continue to experience oppression, including physical attack, psychological torture and rejection by family, friends and communities. In his travels as a journalist, Robin Hammond began to meet people whose very identities are still illegal in their own countries. He set out to interview and photograph them, telling their stories through beautiful images and quotes, in their own words. His project became a passion, and...

The musical group Mirabai Ceiba formed after its two members met and fell in love. Their music blends many traditions and sacred songs into a meditative and beautiful form of meditative and inspiring music. Then, when loss came into their lives, they discovered that the music had to go deeper to incorporate the human experience of grief. Their new recording, Sevati (which means both silence and white rose in Sanskrit) celebrates life in the experience of death. This sacred tapestry supports thos...

Lynda Fell's life was full and happy, with family at the center of it all. Then she got the call no one can imagine getting, your daughter has been in an accident. On the way, she was not expecting what she found when she got to the accident site. Her beautiful, talented and amazing 15 year old, Aly, had died. This most terrible of losses propelled her into deep grief and also into dedicating her life to helping others in the same circumstance. And when her husband suffered a stroke not long aft...

Rudi and Julie fell in love across a great divide. Rudi was born and raised in Germany right after World War II, his father having been a high-ranking Nazi. Julie was a Jew from the Bronx whose father had helped in Germany after the war, managing refugees for the American government. Meeting in Berkeley, against all odds, they fell in love across distances which would have seemed too vast to cross. Their 26 year relationship would take them to Germany, to uncover the roles Rudi's family played i...

Join me as we talk about how the worst time in Amikaeyla’s life led to Music As Medicine, programming she developed which successfully helps people in the United States and around the world (including recently in Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Sierra Leone) unlock their deepest inner voice. What links her work on national and international t.v., on recordings with many award winning artists, singing for His Holiness the Dalai Lama in India and working with...

The loss of a child is beyond our comprehension and throws parents into an eddy, swirling around trying to find a way to shore. But when 18 month old Sophie died, there was the added pain of traumatic loss. Sophie was killed when she was trapped under a hydraulic massage table, in the same room with her mother and brother. What led these grieving parents to agree to be the subjects for Kath McIntyre's film, Remembering Sophie? In part, they did it in honor of Sophie's memory. And in part, they d...

When you lose a child, what makes the difference between collapse and reintegration into your life? Often it is a loving person who has been there and supports the process of recovery while recognizing the feelings of loss. When the Richardson's daughter died, they were cast into the world of crushing loss, but came through it determined to help others traveling the road they had been on. So Melinda Richardson got certified as a grief coach and a mediator and began offering hope and help to othe...

As human beings, we wonder what awaits us after this life is over. When death has come to those near us, the question often becomes compelling! In her quest to understand the many ways people think about what comes next, Claire Bidwell Smith investigated and wrote about various beliefs and practices about the time after death. How do each of us imagine or believe it to be? How does this connect or disconnect us from those we love after their deaths? What can we gain by asking these questions and...

How do we continue to weave the stories of the people we love into our lives after they die. What threads keep us connected to them, as they continue to impact our lives and inform our hearts? Lorraine Hedtke teaches people how to keep these stories present and how to mourn, yet continue to feel our relationships with those we have lost. Through teaching, writing and speaking, she helps others to re-remember, to value the experiences we've had in relationships and to create a pathway for the lov...

Nicki Durlester's family faced staggering losses as a result of the BRCAII gene, which made its members vulnerable to diagnoses of breast and ovarian cancer. Then Nicki herself was diagnosed and treated for breast cancer. Her memoir, Beyond the Pink Moon, shares her family's experience and her own road to health and a new calling in her life; to advocate for other women facing the possibility or reality of breast and ovarian cancer. Her advocacy has resulted in a large international Facebook gro...

Because grief cannot be predicted, it calls on us to ad lib, to feel our ways through an unfamiliar landscape and to find ways to express our experience that nourish and support us. By its nature creative, grief also opens up energy that may result in writing, art, music and many other personal expressions of profound human experience. Discovering this deep creative potential during each of their own loss experience, Cath Duncan and Kara Jones now train other mental health providers to activate ...

How much time have we each spent trying to fix our lives, and ourselves? Having been taught that unpleasant emotion in the enemy, we are ill prepared to gently guide ourselves through troubled times. But what if we learned simply to allow the moment to unfold, putting down our weapons and making friends with our experiences? Mary O'Malley found a more rich and fulfilling life when she learned to simply be with her experiences. All the destructive habits she had developed to avoid what she didn't...

Faced with the ultimate challenge of life—confronting death—how do we want to be remembered? Are there stories we want to tell? Experiences we want to share? Illuminations about how we've felt about life and why? Maybe we want to pass on family stories to the next generations. Perhaps we seek meaning and purpose and don’t know how to access them. It’s likely that we seek comfort and strength. We may even struggle to resolve long standing issues and heal our relationships, or reaching for a deepe...

A childhood filled with trauma and abuse impacts a person for a lifetime. But making sense of those experiences, moving towards wholeness, allows the adult survivor to create a meaningful, satisfying and relational adulthood. But how does this come about? Dave Pelzer, whose first book, A Child Called It, eloquently exposed his story of unimaginable physical and emotional abuse, has now written Too Close to Me. This latest book deeply explores how those early experiences affect his marriage, his ...

Kevin and Brian were in love and successful in their careers when they decided it was time for parenting. After a long search for a child, they were offered three; triplets who were at risk and without anyone to care for them. As a result of their excellent parenting and the help of a large community and family, they brought their children through their early challenges into health and well being. Wrapped in the love of two parents, numerous dogs, aunties, uncles and grandparents, the kids defie...

For many parents, the fear of losing a child is more vivd than losing their own lives. We can't imagine surviving it. And yet, parents do lose their children, to illness or accident, and are left to find a way back to their lives. Eleanor Vincent's 19 year old, Maya, died in an accident just as her life was unfolding, leaving Eleanor unsure if she wanted to go on at all. How did she find her way back to a life of meaning and beauty, bringing healing not only to the loss, but to other painful asp...

Does our exploration of race, sexuality and gender hold a possibility of helping us to awaken? Zenju Manuel believes it does. Through a lifetime of deep questioning and knowing, culminating in her ordination as a zen priest, she has used meditation, indigenous ritual and intuition as paths to liberation. Deeply exploring the losses and deep injury of our experiences, there is also the promise of deepening our lives and discovering our possibilities. Examining how our experiences affect us enlive...

The end of a parent's life is often a steep reversal of roles for both parent and adult child. If the illness is fast moving, there's an avalanche of things to learn about how to care for a now dependent person who, if you are lucky, used to take care of you. How does a child thrust into a new role learn all that is needed to care for a declining parent? When Cheryl Derricotte's mother received a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, she set about to inform herself, driven by an overriding desire to c...

What do we mean when we say we've had a run of bad luck? We mean that we have experienced loss after loss, until we're not even sure which heartache is sending us into the depths of despair. Like quicksand, it seems as if we'll never get out. Annah Elizabeth went through such a time, with numerous fertility losses, her husband's affair while she was still vulnerable and the loss of the ground she had always stood on. How did she come through all that to live a joyous life? Join us to discover wh...

Isabel and Anabel Stenzel, identical twins diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis as babies, faced a lifetime of ill health and the probability that they would die very young. They also faced numerous losses of friends who had the same disease. Very young, they began keeping a record of their hospital experiences, drawing pictures and writing what happened along the way. Ultimately as adults, they collaborated on a book, The Power of Two, and were featured in a documentary of the same name. As a result ...