Nathalie Himmelrich

Inspiring Hope | Finding healthy ways of Grieving | Writer

grief and loss

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.

Nathalie with Melo Garcia on Compound Grief and Finding Someone Who Speaks Grief | Episode 3

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Melo Garcia on Compound Grief and Finding Someone Who Speaks Grief

‘When you decide that it is yours, you’ll understand that along with that grief comes an amazing life of living after loss because you have something that no one else can ever, ever have. And that is the love, that is the love – that’s the love that remains.’

Melo has experienced three multiple significant losses in a short time frame. In this interview, she explains how through grief it felt as if she lost her mind and found it again in her journey with grief and trauma.

About this week’s guest

Melo Garcia, a grief specialist, assists those who have lost what isn’t replaceable. She created After Chloe, an online community that provides support, resources, and assistance through the difficult grief journey, in honor of her daughter Chloe who passed away in 2011, and after losing both her parents.

Melo felt it necessary to help others deal with the grief and loss life presents from death, divorce, identity, age, fertility, and empty-nesting by creating various types of solutions that the grieving finds a life worth living.

In 2021 she started the podcast, The Resilience of Grieving, and hosts an annual online Summit during the holidays to provide resources to grievers.

Melo allows you to speak your grief in your way, a way that will assist you and inspire you to live and grieve. Find out more about Melo on After Chloe on Instagram.

Topics discussed in this episode

  • Compound grief: The death of Melo’s father, mother, and baby daughter Chloe in the time span of two years
  • How to deal with therapists who do not speak grief
  • How to understand trauma and how grief and trauma have changed her and shaped her life
  • Self-help through bibliotherapy

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.

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.

Nathalie with Rachel Tenpenny on Why and How Healing Is Possible | Episode 1

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In this episode, we will be talking about child loss and loss through a divorce. I’m joined by Rachel Tenpenny, who is sharing her experiences and her insight that healing is possible.

I promise that if you will be here listening until the very end, you will know why she is absolutely sure that healing is possible. I’ve known Rachel for many years. In fact, since the first book I’ve written, Grieving Parents: Surviving Loss as a Couple, where I interviewed her and I still remember the things that she said, which are exceptional.

About this week’s guest

Rachel Tenpenny is a grief expert, emotional well-being specialist, and life-after-loss coach. With over 13 years of experience healing her own heart after her baby daughters died in 2008, she has helped hundreds of people find healing after life’s most painful experiences. Rachel believes grief is not forever and teaches grievers how to heal physically and emotionally with a unique and effective holistic approach to cultivating healing that lasts a lifetime. Originally from a small town in Southern California, she now lives in Northern Virginia with her two boys, Dustin and Colton.

Episode introduction

‘Whether healing is possible or not, is irrelevant. It has to be possible for me because this is the life that I want, and I am not willing to give up.’ 

Rachel Tenpenny gave birth to twin girls Aubrey and Ellie on June 24th, 2008. They both died a few days after their birth. Rachel talks to us about her grieving and healing story and how she came to strongly believe that healing is possible

Topics discussed in this episode

  • Why and how healing is possible
  • A society that does not understand grief and how confused we are about grief 
  • What does it look like when ‘grief isn’t forever’? 
  • We don’t have to be isolated in our grief
  • Debunking grief myths
  • ‘Time heals all wounds’: Time is just time, it is what we choose to do with time
  • Grief skills are life skills and need to be learned

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. 

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.

This really hurt

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image from personal archive

With a pain in my stomach, I write to you today. This week I received an email from one of my subscribers that really hurt.

She wrote:

I wish ppl would stop trying to make money off us. If you’ve known this kind of tragedy (losing your only child) you know there are setbacks, depression, loss of job, spouse, etc. It’s so unnecessary. So I’m unsubscribing and marking spam.

It pains me to be misunderstood, my passion to be taken the wrong way.

I do know of setbacks: I have experienced the loss of a child, dealt with trauma from the aftermath of my mother’s suicide, sexual abuse, and burnout. And – most recently – divorce.

This is part of why I’m doing what I’m doing!

I want to be honest with you: This is my passion:

–> to support YOU who are dealing with grief and trauma.

It is my life’s work.

My heart is in my work

Still, I also earn my living from supporting people: working with clients, writing and selling books, giving courses. All of this requires my time and my creative work.

It requires investment in my personal as well as professional resources outside of myself. For example:

  • costs for book self-publishing: cost for a editor and interior designer,
  • costs for my therapeutic work: on-going professional training and memberships,
  • everyday business expenses such as: web hosting, book keeping and accounting, membership for the platform that sends you email newsletters.

…just to name a few.

I also do and have done a lot of unpaid work for the community and outreach work, donate my books regularly to grief support groups, give away free spots on my courses, etc. I feel in balance.

My work is not only born from personal life experience, it is grounded in solid professional training and years of professional experience.

Making money from people’s pain

If you believe, people like me ‘are making money off people in pain’, you’ve got it the wrong way around:

We are not making money off your pain, we are supporting your healing because we are passionate about healing and are earning our living while doing what is our passion.

Unsubscribe

The subscriber I quoted above did not unsubscribe. I deleted her email address because I do not need to pay to send her stuff she does not want.

Please, if you no longer benefit from the content I provide in my newsletters, unsubscribe through the link at the bottom of the email. No explanation is needed.

And: I’m surprised you’re reading this far.

Much Love ♥️

💭 I daydream…

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I daydream about … 💫 who they would have become ✨

Grief Quote by Nathalie Himmelrich

Last night I went to Ananda Mae’s parents’ evening at the school. Every parent had to introduce their child given it was a new formation of kids.

As I heard the other parents describe their child, mentioning their siblings, I went off daydreaming about AM’s sister, A’Mya.

Who would you have become? What would it be like for the two to go to the same school, or even class? To share friends, experiences, and birthdays?

Just the other day Ananda Mae had asked me to daydream with her about her sister. She asked exactly those questions. “Mum, would A’Mya look just like me?” “I imagine very similar, given you are identical twins,” I replied.

Go ahead, daydream

Daydreaming about a future that cannot be is a way of remembering. Remembering your loved one. Living a relationship, learning to be in a new relationship when the kind of relationship we would have wanted to live is no longer possible.

Whoever came up with the notion ‘not to grow up the child/baby who died’ (I remember it was a therapist 🤦🏽‍♀️ – not me though) was wrong. It is completely normal and natural to do so, at least in my experience and the experience of her surviving twin.

Thank you for being right here and now with me 🕊

Birth and Death Anniversaries Are Hard

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Death anniversaries are the hardest.

Annonymous client

Death anniversaries are hard

She uttered the sentence in response to my public sharing on Instagram regarding the fact that it is 10 years since my girls were born and A’Mya died:

It also means that my grief journey with A’Mya is turning 10 years old. 10 years without her. ⠀
⠀
10. ⠀
⠀
I find it hard to believe that is already 10 years.⠀

10 years ago I was pregnant.
I knew it was my last day of pregnancy.
I knew it was the last day of Hope & Passion inside me.
Alive.
Together.
Side by side.
To be born tomorrow.

31 August 2011

It’s the time of year… birth, death, all intertwined… and I’m so wrapped up in my own physical reactions and responses to the memories that I didn’t have any capacity to remember much of anything else.

Grey’s Anatomy can trigger grief

The past few days, when I was resting (I broke my right little toe) I watched Grey’s Anatomy. In this episode, a mother had just given birth to an extremely premature little baby. The doctors are fighting for his life, discussing chances of survival, treatment plans, etc. while the parents (who happen to be also doctors) watch in despair.

And then it hits me as I’m watching the part where two doctors are reviewing the board with all the children who once were born early, been in the NICU, and are shown here as toddlers and children. “Some of them survive,” Alex says.

Synchronicity or self-torture?

I turn it off. Still, I will return to it. It’s not (just?) self-torture, it is integrating what has happened and building the resilience of being with those places in my memory, in peace, with sadness but without absolute hopelessness and dread.

To me, that is the result of grief work. My grief work.

Birth and death

In my experience, birth and death have been experienced in close proximity. Ananda Mae and A’Mya Mirica were born 10 years ago today.

Three days later, A’Mya died in my arms. Big sigh.

Birthday, and not just for me but also for Ananda Mae, is closely intertwined with the fact that her sister isn’t here today. I’ve noticed that in my young daughter now more so than ever before.

On the weekend she cried saying I just wished I could talk to A’Mya.

Last night she woke and couldn’t sleep between 12 and 1 am – synchronistically the time where the two sisters were born if we take the time difference into consideration.

And – another synchronicity – just as I’m typing this, it is 8.40 am – the time of day they were born.

Just a coincidence?

I don’t think so. In the past 10 years and even before that I have experienced far too many of those seeming coincidences.

Image: Personal archives

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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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