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Nathalie Himmelrich

Inspiring Hope | Finding healthy ways of Grieving | Writer

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book suggestion

Book Review – On Grief And Grieving By Elisabeth Kübler-Ross And David Kessler

January 4, 2011 By Nathalie Himmelrich Leave a Comment

On Grief and Grieving

This book about grief is one of my favourites and it is one of the most thorough coverage on this topic. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross has helped many people find the meaning of grief through her introduction of the five stages of loss.

Summary

Basically, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross demystifies the process of grieving and helps people cope with themselves going through grief or with people they know, who have lost someone. According to her there are five stages of loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, which she explains in detail.

More in detail

Shortly before her death in 2004, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler, her collaborator, completed the manuscript for this book. On Grief and Grieving is her final book and a fitting completion to her work.

The first chapter of the book is a detailed description and explanation of the five stages of grief, each part containing stories to exemplify what it would look like in people’s lives. Even just reading this part brings relief to people struggling to understand what they are going through.

The next two chapters cover the inner an outer world of grief, covering various topics of interest like: your loss, tears, dreams, regrets, roles, the story, resentment, isolation, punishment, afterlife, anniversaries, sex, your body and your health, just to name a few.

The chapter following is dedicated to special circumstances like children, multiple losses, disasters, suicide, Alzheimer disease and sudden death. If you have suffered a loss in these areas please read the specific part to give you more insight into your story.

The chapters towards the end of the book include the changing face of grief and the authors’ personal stories of their own grief.

On Grief and Grieving has profoundly influenced the way we experience the process of grief.

About the author

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was a Swiss-born psychiatrist, who lived between 1926 and 2004. She pioneered near-death studies and wrote seventeen books over a thirty-six years period. Her groundbreaking On Death and Dying changed the way we talked about the end of life.

After studying medicine, to the dismay of her father, she later moved to the States and continues her studies in New York. She worked as a psychiatric resident where she became interested in patients who were dying, encouraging the hospice care movement, and believing that euthanasia prevents people from completing their ‘unfinished business’.

In her later life, she suffered a series of strokes in 1995, which left her partially paralyzed on her left side. In one of their final writing sessions, Kübler-Ross told Kessler, “The last nine years have taught me patience, and the weaker and more bed-bound I become, the more I’m learning about receiving love.”

Recommendation

This is a must to read for anyone working or dealing with people suffering the loss of a loved one, experiencing grief themselves or dealing with a terminal illness, where anticipatory grief comes into play. Personally, in my work, I refer to this book often when dealing with clients.

Filed Under: child loss, grief/loss, grieving parents Tagged With: book review, book suggestion, book suggestion, David Kessler, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, grief, grief therapy, grieving, loss

Awakening

July 16, 2009 By Nathalie Himmelrich Leave a Comment

Photo by Juan Gomez on Unsplash

Awakening is a shift in consciousness in which thinking and awareness separate. For most people, it is not an event but a process they undergo. Even those rare being who experience a sudden, dramatic and seemingly irreversible awakening will still go through a process in which the new state of consciousness gradually flows into and transforms everything they do and so becomes integrated into their lives.

Instead of being lost in your thinking, when you are awake you recognize yourself as the awareness behind it. Thinking then ceases to be a self-serving autonomous activity that takes possession of you and runs your life. Awareness takes over from thinking. Instead of being in charge of your life, thinking becomes the servant of awareness. Awareness is conscious connection with universal intelligence. Another word for it is Presence: consciousness without thought.

The initiation of the awakening process is an act of grace. You cannot make it happen nor can you prepare yourself for it or accumulate credits toward it. There isn’t a tidy sequence of logical steps that leads toward it, although the mind would love that. You don’t have to become worthy first. I may come to the sinner before it comes to the saint.

There is nothing you can DO about awakening. Whatever you do will be the ego trying to add awakening or enlightenment to itself as a prized possession and thereby making itself more important and bigger.

(Inspired by Eckhart Tolle’s book ‘A New Earth’)

Filed Under: self development/motivation, spirituality Tagged With: a new earth, awakening, eckhart tolle, spiritual awakening

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