Nathalie Himmelrich

Inspiring Hope | Finding healthy ways of Grieving | Writer

self development/motivation

55 Emma Payne Dealing with Suicide Partner Loss Led to the Development of Help Texts

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HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is completely self-funded, produced, and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich.
Consider making a small donation to support the Podcast: bit.ly/SupportGTPodcast. Thank you! 

For more information, please visit Nathalie’s website, join the podcast’s Instagram page, and subscribe to the newsletter to receive updates on future episodes here.

About this week’s episode 

Emma lost her husband Barry through suicide. In the first part of the episode, Emma candidly shares how she dealt with his death while living in a foreign country, without any family around. She describes how people reacted to the suicide and stopped being in contact with her. Ten years after Barry’s death, attending their best friend’s funeral she reconnected with so many people and one after the other apologized for not knowing what to say or do. This meeting changed Emma’s life and led to the creation of Help Texts, which supports grievers after all kinds of losses. I’m not easily recommending grief resources, but I will absolutely put my hand up for this amazing support and have provided my expertise and the content of my grief books to be used in Help Texts. So I am a proud supporter – Go check out Help Text here: helptexts.com/griefandtrauma and get a discount if you’d like to sign up. 

About this week’s guest 

Emma Payne is a seasoned technology entrepreneur and MIT graduate who started building online communities before Netscape was born. She is the founder and CEO of Help Texts, a game-changing SaaS, short for software as a service, business that delivers ongoing, accessible, expert grief and mental health support globally, via text message. Every single day, Emma combines her personal grief experience and her more than 25 years in the tech space to provide people with thoughtful, practical support that really works. Straight to their phones.

Website: helptexts.com
Instagram: @help.texts
 Facebook: www.facebook.com/helptexts
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/helptexts

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Thank you for listening!

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is produced and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich. Support the show

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52 James Fish Gill Bringing Loving Awareness To Your Pain Part 2

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James Fish Gill

➡️ If you haven’t listened to Part 1 – head back here first.

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is completely self-funded, produced, and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich.
Consider making a small donation to support the Podcast: bit.ly/SupportGTPodcast. Thank you! 

For more information, please visit Nathalie’s website, join the podcast’s Instagram page, and subscribe to the newsletter to receive updates on future episodes here.

About this week’s episode

This amazing conversation with James Fish Gill from Australia comes to you in the form of a double episode. Fish, as he refers to himself, has so much wisdom to share, I already knew before we started recording that it would not fit into the usual 45 minutes of this podcast. I knew Fish from Instagram, where I became intrigued with his approach to conscious communication. Listening to some of the podcasts where he had been a guest, I’ve been so drawn to what he shared in his capacity as a coach and through his unique approach.

In episodes 51 and 52, he takes us through how he dealt with his own grief, using the approach of conscious communication with himself: first, he honestly acknowledged and validated all his thoughts, then felt into the actual emotional experience. From there, he entered the field of his yearning and the longing in his heart which he recognized and honored, even when it – in the case of his loss – could not be met. Bringing loving awareness to the whole experience, without wanting to change it, makes every component of the experience matter.

Fish says we are not usually bringing loving awareness, but we are trained to respond to pain by usually dismissing, minimizing, comparing, assigning fault, understanding, or fixing when what it actually needs is validating it.
Ok, I won’t say more but I can promise you with certainty that if you listened to one episode, you would want to listen to the other too.

About this week’s guest

James Gill (aka ‘Fish’) is a heart coach, yoga teacher, and transformational facilitator based in Australia and working internationally. He is committed to the global spread of conscious communication practices that enable all beings to experience love in every moment which appears to have gone missing.

Fish’s links:

Resources mentioned in this episode:

  • The Guest House, poem by Jelaluddin Rumi

Thank you for listening!

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is produced and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich.

Support the show

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46 Coco Buchmann on Motherloss After 23 Years of Anticipatory Grief

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Coco Buchmann

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is completely self, funded, produced, and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich.
Consider making a small donation to support the Podcast: bit.ly/SupportGTPodcast. Thank you! 

For more information, please visit Nathalie’s website, join the podcast’s Instagram page, and subscribe to the newsletter to receive updates on future episodes here.

I’ve known Coco personally as we studied Somatic Experience, Peter Levine’s extensive professional trauma training, together. I accompanied her as she dealt with the intensive relationship with her mother and the grief over her mother’s subsequent death. From a young age – for half of her own life – Coco cared for her mother and had to be the one to make decisions regarding her mother’s care in her 23-year-long battle with cancer and mental health issues.  

About this week’s guest 

Coco Buchmann is a body psychotherapist and trauma therapist. She is also the mother of two boys, 11 and 8 years old. 
 She originally studied improvisation and contemporary dance and later added clinical psychology, integrative body psychotherapy, and Somatic Experiencing to her repertoire. Most recently she finished her yoga teacher’s training which she practices in her daily life, besides dance, and Tao Yoga (Chi Gong). 
As a therapist, Coco has been working with individuals, dealing with mental illness, such as depression and anxiety, and she also worked with couples. 
 Eighteen months ago, she started a sabbatical to delve into her own grieving process and to follow her destiny and passion to write a book about the expression of the true self and aliveness, a process which she has coined Yogawave.
 Coco experienced many kinds of losses and traumas in her life, on a physical, emotional, and spiritual level. 
 Over the last 20 years, she has been obsessed with finding the connection between trauma, loss, and the nervous system and has been investigating the deeper layers of the soul and the energies in the body.

Coco’s website: www.chill-dini-basis.com

Other episodes mentioned in this episode:

Thank you for listening!

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is produced and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich. 

Support the show:

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Estelle Thompson on How Art and Yoga Saved My Life | Episode 32

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Estelle Thompson
Estelle Thompson

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is completely self-funded, produced, and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich.
Consider making a small donation to support the Podcast here. Thank you! 

Today on the podcast I am speaking with Estelle Thompson, who has been an inspiration for me for years. We’ve met on Instagram as part of a yearly event called May We All Heal which I started in 2015 and gave grieving mothers a creative outlet and an avenue to share with others. Estelle has a way of using art and yoga in her healing journey that drew me in and it was an honor for me to be speaking with her. Here is someone who can laugh while crying, who exemplifies living with the paradox of living a creative life while holding the gift of what death has brought her.  

About this week’s guest 

Estelle Thomson, M.A. in Counselling Psychology is a leading yoga teacher and educator in the intersecting fields of expressive arts, embodied movement, and psychology. With over ten years of experience, her work explores the relationship between breath, body, emotions, imagination, and play. Estelle is a faculty member of Quantum University, internationally recognized for offering online courses and graduate degree programs in holistic, alternative, natural, and integrative medicine. Estelle leads numerous lectures, workshops, and retreats locally and internationally.

Estelle’s links: Website | Instagram

Topics discussed in this episode

  • Giving birth prematurely and the unexpected death of her son Tommy Tinker when he was just 2 years old 
  • Art and yoga saved her life
  • Writing for grief
  • Change of identity
  • How to use creativity

Resources mentioned in this episode 

Links

–> For more information, please visit Nathalie’s website. 

–> Subscribe to the newsletter to receive updates on future episodes here.

–> Join the podcast’s Instagram page.

Thanks for listening to HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA. If you’d like to be updated on future episodes, please subscribe to my newsletter on Nathalie Himmelrich.com

If you need grief support, please contact me for a FREE 30 min discovery session.

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is produced and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich. 

Nathalie with Turiya Hanover on the Loss of Significant Partners in Life | Episode 4

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Turiya Hanover on How To Deal With Grief and Trauma Podcast

Today I speak with Turiya, who – among other losses and traumas – shares the turning point in her life when she lost her then 33-year-old husband Welf von Hannover in 1981. Her relationship with death and the impermanence of physical life significantly changed another time with the loss of her most beloved partner Maja just 6 months ago, where she experienced something, she never had before: 

‘Then one night the message came, and it was: Love Is All. And there was such a strong feeling. Love is the bond that brings us over the bridge and that brings two things into oneness, that overcomes the separation. In this case, the separation is a loss of the physical body. But the heart and the love are there. Love Is All.’ 

Turiya Hanover

Turiya’s story is deeply moving and will encourage you to look for something beyond the physical. 

About this week’s guest 

Turiya is the co-founder of Path Retreats and the transformational process – Path of Love with Rafia Morgan. Together they also lead a one-year Holistic Counsellor training for therapists called Working with People – School of Counselling. 

She has been trained in many different modalities such as Gestalt, Bioenergetics, Psychodrama, Family Therapy (V. Satir), NLP, Hypnosis, Somatic Experiencing™ (Peter Levine), Ego Psychology, Family Constellation, Enneagram and Astrology, and Essence Work.

Turiya’s personal journey into human development started when she did her first 2-year Jungian Psychotherapy course aged 22, followed by an encounter workshop in 1970 in Germany. The revelation and exploration of this Humanistic Psychology approach took Turiya by surprise. The internal shift that she experienced was so profound, that she and her husband, set on a new course of human discovery, which led them to India. Through learning meditation, living, and working in a community under the guidance of a master, she developed a unique approach to working with people that is a synthesis of eastern insights, living awareness, and a western approach to humanistic psychology.

The sudden, unexpected death of her husband marked a turning point in Turiya’s life. This profound experience deeply influenced her own personal search and how she works with people today.

Today Turiya has the joy of being a grandmother and spends her free time painting and writing a book about the rising of the feminine and about Death as a friend and the realisation of Impermanence. 

Topics discussed in this episode

  • The death of her grandfather when she was 7 years old 
  • The sudden and unexpected death of her husband Welf von Hannover at the age of 33 years old at the Osho Ashram
  • The lacking understanding of shock and trauma in the 80s
  • The fear of death always being present
  • Living in a culture that avoids death and experiences a lack of connection to the formless
  • Osho’s death
  • The death of her partner Maja
  • Grief and loneliness can make one feel orphaned by existence
  • The importance of contact in the face of grief

Resources mentioned in this episode

  • Quote by Carlos Castaneda:
    ‘Death is our eternal companion. It is always to our left, an arm’s length behind us. Death is the only wise adviser that a warrior has. Whenever he feels that everything is going wrong and he’s about to be annihilated, he can turn to his death and ask if that is so. His death will tell him that he is wrong, that nothing really matters outside its touch. His death will tell him, I haven’t touched you yet.’
  • A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as if It Were Your Last by Stephen Levine

Links

–> For more information, please visit Nathalie’s website. 

–> Subscribe to the newsletter to receive updates on future episodes here.

–> Join the podcast’s Instagram page.

Thanks for listening to HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA. If you’d like to be updated on future episodes, please subscribe to my newsletter on Nathalie Himmelrich.com

If you need grief support, please contact me for a FREE 30 min discovery session.

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is produced and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich. 

Support this Podcast

To support this podcast, please rate, review, subscribe to, or follow the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.

Remember to keep breathing, I promise, it will get easier.

New Year New Grief

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woman in pickup
Photo by averie woodard on Unsplash

Setting intentions for the New Year ’s intentions are all around at this time of the year. For many of us, bereaved parents, the holidays and New Year’s celebration with its ‘merry’ and ‘happy’ wishes can lead us to slide down and get lost in another grief rabbit-hole. We are left with the sentiment that nothing that the New Year brings can make the feelings of loss any better.

Surviving the Holidays

The good news:

Welcome on the other side. Take a breath. You survived the holidays. 
As much as I love part of the holiday spirit, I often encounter myself in a quiet, unsociable mood and end up spending – at least some part of it – by myself. This is how I re-energize and re-calibrate for whatever newness might come with the New Year.

Setting Intentions

For the New Year, I asked the community of the Grieving Parents Support Network to share their intentions, relating to their grief. Here is what they said:

  • I spent the last year encumbered by grief, but unable to process. The loss of one twin and the survival of another have kept me in a state of limbo between that grief and the happiness being a first-time mom evokes. I have felt guilty for enjoying certain moments without Benji, just as much as I have felt guilty not enjoying others with his brother.
    My intention for 2018 is to process and get to a point where that guilt isn’t there, in either direction.
  • I am creating a bucket list, it reiterates the last line of the poem “to live in a way that would make you proud”  in memory of Sam 7/5/2015
  • I promise to hold onto hope even when I feel blind.
  • My New Year’s intentions are to keep Charlotte’s memory alive, to celebrate her birthday (15) and the day she gained her wings (28), to share pictures and videos of her that people haven’t seen on the 15th and 28th of each month, and to organize something for friends and family to participate in to remember Baby Charlotte.

Or it can be as simple as: “I intend to take one day at a time.”

Intentions don’t have to be hard and fast rules or goals as you would set them in a business plan. Whatever your intentions are, think about them as guiding principles that will lead you through the year.

Grieving in healthy ways, for me, means not to look for ways ‘to get over it’ or ‘through it’ as a way to get it done. It is about finding ways to be curious about what is stirring in my heart. Integrating not just the memory, but my ever-unfolding experience into my life. In this light, dear healthy grieved, here some New Year Review Questions for you:

  1. What have you learned about yourself and grief/grieving?
  2. What has changed since the loss of your child? Hint: make it specific. Look both for negative and positive things (for example I no longer take life for granted.)
  3. What are you ready to let go?
  4. How do you want to be with your grief in the New Year?

Looking Forward

What do you want to bring forward into this New Year?
Setting an intention can be powerful. Author Lynn McTaggart* has found that for something to occur it is 300,000 times more likely when one has set an intention.

INSPIRATION NEEDED?

You can check out mine on the GPSNetwork blog and take whichever you like.

* References can be found in the books by Lynn McTaggart: The Field and The Intention Experiment

This article was first published January 3, 2018 in Still Standing Magazine.

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    Nathalie Himmelrich

    I accompany people therapeutically as a holistic counsellor and coach.

    I walk alongside people dealing with the challenges presented by life and death.

    I’m also a writer and published author of multiple grief resource books and the founder of the Grieving Parents Support Network.

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