Get a unique insight into health, bereavement, and healing Bereavement Counseling: Pastoral Care for Complicated Grieving is a practical guide to the assessment and treatment of complicated grief responses, using a pastoral approach that combines clinical and spiritual care. The book addresses current theory, observations, and experience, and examines changing approaches and developing standards of practice. The author, an ordained minister with an extensive background in pastoral counseling, integrates spirituality into the grieving process by focusing on the partnership between spirituality and healing, the resources of spiritual practices, and the functions of counseling and spiritual/pastoral psychotherapy. By providing usable treatment strategies, sharing standard interventions, and promoting technical skill for caregivers, Bereavement Counseling: Pastoral Care for Complicated Grieving places sustained emphasis on giving voice to grief and recovery. The author draws from more than 20 years' experience in ministry, teaching, supervision, consultation, and therapy to present stories, vignettes, and poetry that give depth and life to the grieving process. These vignettes provide a unique insight into health, bereavement, and healing and create a living context for maintaining a person-centered focus that promotes meaning and leads to positive outcomes. The book provides templates as assessment and treatment planning aids and includes an extensive bibliography of up-to-date journal articles that reflect the latest research in the field. Topics addressed in Bereavement Counseling: Pastoral Care for Complicated Grieving include: universal grief processes and responses dysfunctional grieving therapies and treatment priorities reorganization and recovery how perceptions, thoughts, and belief influence care and much more Bereavement Counseling: Pastoral Care for Complicated Grieving is a practical resource for clergy, pastoral care

Over forty reflections offer insights that will touch a woman's heart, heal her soul and point out new and hopeful directions.

Offering both comfort to the fearful and confirmation to the curious, this title examines different levels of existence in the spirit realms.

What happens at the point of death?

Where do we go afterwards?

Does one s personality survive after death?

How are the good and the bad experiences of life accounted for?

What is the purpose of life?

These are questions everybody asks. And no one is better qualified to provide reasonable answers than Dolores Cannon. During fifteen years of detailed research, this widely experienced and well-respected American past-life regression therapist has accumulated a mass of credible information about the death experience and what lies beyond.

While reliving their dying experiences, hundreds of subjects reported the same memories. The similarity and sincerity of their recollections are too convincing to be ignored. This book is a good introduction to the death experience, to guides and guardian angels; ghosts and walk-ins. It examines different levels of existence in the spirit realms; the healing places for the damaged; the schools where you integrate lessons learned on Earth and where you discover the laws of the Universe; how you plan your next incarnation, the lessons to be learned and future karmic relationships before birth."

In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by. One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product of rogue technology: Terry's mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed to the fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s. As it interweaves these narratives of dying and accommodation, Refuge transforms tragedy into a document of renewal and spiritual grace, resulting in a work that has become a classic.

Even from upside-down in his recently flipped truck, Frank Soos reveals himself to be ruminative, grappling with the limitations of language to express the human condition. Moving quickly-skiing in the dark or taking long summer bike rides on Alaska highways-Soos combines an active physical life with a dark and difficult interior existence, wrestling the full span of "thinking and doing" onto the page with surprising lightness. His meditations move from fly-fishing in dangerously swift Alaska rivers to memories of the liars and dirty-joke tellers of his small-town Virginia childhood, revealing insights in new encounters and old preoccupations. Soos writes about pain and despair, aging, his divorce, his father's passing, regret, the loss of home, and the fear of death. But in the process of confronting these dark topics, he is full of wonder. As he writes at the end of an account of almost drowning, "Bruised but whole, I was alive, alive, alive."

We have all heard the saying that there is something unique about a mother's love. The saying suggests that those who have known or experienced true love from a mother will discover that nothing can be compared to its captivating power and strength. That strength has been known to carry many a child through ebbs and flows in life and land them back at the very place where that mother wanted them to be. This is a rare account of eight sons and one daughter-in-law who have memorialized their mother by recounting her legacy of training and love. With candor, humor and passion each lays bare a heart that has known the incredible power of a mother's love. Each of them, in their own way, talks about their relationship with their mother, the values she taught them and the ways in which their lives have been enlarged by her love. They each also share nuggets of their own pain over her lost and the void they felt at her passing. Ma Ruth's Story is rich with aphorisms, teachings, special sayings, proverbs and good old-fashioned common sense that all children need to hear and all parents need to know about. -Dr. Mary H. Young

Raw, honest and personal thoughts to comfort you on the journey through grief. Grief can often feel like a gnawing homesickness for a place where you used to live, but can never return to. Richard Littledale has written a series of short, candid thoughts and reflections from his own experience of widowhood that will resonate and bring comfort and understanding to anyone experiencing bereavement. These thoughts are written as postcards from the land of grief, as they are used to convey a message from this foreign country of bereavement. Postcards are, by definition, a small snapshot of a feeling at anyone time, not long and drawn out essays, and these thoughts provide an accessible way to identify feelings and draw hope from a fellow traveller. Richard also includes practical resources and advice on the grieving process, and reflects on how his faith in God has sustained him. The book is deliberately designed to be able to dip in and out of as required at the point of need. It is also useful for those who want to give a helpful book to comfort a friend, or for anyone wanting to help understand how their bereaved loved one might beling.