May We All Heal is a creative healing event, where we reflect on our grief. Participants from all over the world take part in this online event, sharing their images and thoughts.
May We All Heal and its history
Originally created by a few women from the Grieving Parents Support Network it is now in its third year. It lasts throughout the whole month of May. It allows bereaved parents to focus on aspects of their grieving and healing. This is done by using any form of creativity, be that drawing, colouring-in, doodling, writing, talking, singing, dancing, modelling with clay, or any other form. Another important part is the reflections on the prompt that is offered for each day.
Why would I want to delve into these memories and the emotions they evoke?
Author David Rock’s book Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long explains:
“To reduce arousal, you need to use just a few words to describe an emotion, and ideally use symbolic language, which means using indirect metaphors, metrics, and simplifications of your experience. This requires you to activate your prefrontal cortex, which reduces the arousal in the limbic system. Here’s the bottom line: describe an emotion in just a word or two, and it helps reduce the emotion.” Even though this hasn’t specifically been written in the context of grief, it describes what happens when we reflect on our emotions through the use of symbolic language which creativity is part of.
This is what we are doing in ‘May We All Heal’, where we are using creative metaphors and words to describe our internal processing. Just by doing that, we are changing the fabric of grieving and allowing healing.
You are not alone
As much as the statement ‘you are not alone’ is uttered, it needs to be experienced to be believed. ‘May We All Heal’ harnesses the power of community, the ‘we’ as Sherly Sandberg in her interview with Time describes.
The participants share their creative images and words of reflection on social media like Instagram and Facebook. Using the hashtags #MayWeAllHeal and #MWAH allows participants to find one another and read and comment. On the event page on Facebook, there is also space for the participant to share and communicate with each other.
Participants feel enriched through this experience. They said: “I feel comfortable here” or “I’m so glad I found the May We All Heal event because it is so beneficial for my healing”.
Come and join us! You can start any day. All information is here: May We All Heal yearly event.
Buy the May We All Heal companion playbook here.
Facebook peer support group: May We All Heal
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