Good Grief: The A to Z Approach of Modern Day Grief Healing
I learned many moons ago that there is no such thing as coincidence and everything is a beautiful synchronicity in our life. Good Grief: The A to Z Approach of Modern Day Grief Healing is a book for your grief journey, but the book itself has been on its own unique journey to be able to be held in your hands today.
I am not one of those souls who had childhood dreams of what they wanted to become when they grew up, more of a zig-zagger when it comes to job choices. Whilst I zoomed in and out of many roles, thirty years of my life was working within the healthcare arena, fulfilling roles from pharmaceutical science through to chemotherapy nursing.
Being in these emotive environments allowed me to witness the human spirit time and time again in its most vulnerable state through loss. The losses varied from loss of health or known way of life through to the death of a loved one. What I came to witness was that there is nothing stronger than our human spirit, but we rarely dare to believe just how powerful and capable we are when lost in the midst of grief and loss.
When I entered the world of nursing, I went in feeling like a superhero minus the cape, but it was only a matter of weeks before my own enthusiastic spirit took knocks as I realised I would not be able to save everyone I encountered. I was ill prepared for the life lessons that laid ahead for me, as well as the patients and family members I met along the way. The prominence of working in healthcare is just that; health. We are driven and all things passionate to get people back to health by the quickest route possible. However, life is not always a possibility and instead we need to learn about dying, death and life thereafter.
When I started my nursing degree back in 2001, I was passionate in heart but inexperienced in life, despite being a mature student at the time (28 years young). It was only as I started learning about healthcare, often including dying and death, that my own family exposed me to personal loss, as within months of starting my degree my Grandad died.
He did not die instantly though, he hung on for around a month so that he got to see his wedding anniversary to my Gran. This observation is one of many I share in Good Grief, as I have seen patients hang on whilst loved ones fly in from the other side of the world, and others choosing to pass the moment you leave the ward to grab a cup of tea. A friend died through suicide despite being physically healthy as his mental health was too much for him to keep carrying. My beautiful step-father died suddenly on New Year’s Day, and loss after loss peppered my personal and career path in many different ways.
The more I nursed and the more loss I experienced in my own life, the greater learnings I had around what happens to us at the end of our earthly incarnation. I came to see the difference between what clinically happens compared to spiritual occurrences. I came to learn that we are more than our physical body in death, and our life is more than our grief, so we must always endeavour to move forwards after loss, even when the way forward is not in a way we would have ever foreseen or foretold.
All these comforting insights may well have died within me if it had not been for the beautiful synchronicity of working with a life coach in 2019 as I frantically tried to grasp clarity on what it is I wanted to do in my life now I had left nursing and our children were all in full time education. My coach took me backwards and asked why I chose to leave nursing when it had been such a key part of my life and identity.
With absolute clarity I told her that I had witnessed so many spiritual occurrences around death that I no longer felt in the right place clinically to nurse. As I casually shared my story, it concluded with me looking up to see my coach with her mouth ajar, asking why on earth had my first book not been about that?
Why was I not sharing the comforting words of dying, death, grief, communication, and spiritual ways in which to heal? It is said that we all have a book within us, and this was how Good Grief went from being thirty years of powerful observations into a companion for your grief journey, whether you have lost someone or a known way of life.
Good Grief is not your average grief book as it talks about life and life lessons, as much as it talks about dying, death, life thereafter and the Afterlife, grief and the healing potential we all carry within us. I truly believe we all experience loss, time and time again, but do not always recognise that we are experiencing a grief process, so struggle on through feeling half mad or totally misunderstood. Good Grief: The A to Z Approach of Modern Day Grief Healing has come as I have reached the end of its thirty years of observing and working with grief, and shares insight so that you can move forward in life, even though you may not believe in yourself as much as I do in this very moment.
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ABOUT SHELLEY F. KNIGHT
Shelley F. Knight is a once upon a time nurse turned writer who provides an eclectic blend of clinical, holistic and spiritual expertise in her specialist subjects of Positive Changes, Spirituality, and Grief.
She is author of Positive Changes: A Self-Kick Book (November 2018), and Good Grief: The A to Z Approach of Modern Day Grief Healing (24th September 2021).
Shelley is also host of the award-winning mental health show, Positive Changes: A Self-Kick Podcast.
Shelley holds a first class degree in adult nursing, and post graduate studies in Palliative Care and Life Limiting Illness, Pathophysiology of Cancer, Cytotoxic Chemotherapy, and Clinical Hypnotherapy.
In addition, Shelley holds a plethora of holistic and spiritual qualifications, including Transformational Regression Therapy, Spiritual Coaching, Spiritual Development Teacher, Holistic Diagnosis Skills, Mindfulness, Neuro Linguistic Programming, Herbalism, and Dream Therapy.
She is also an intuitive Tarot card reader, and intuitive Tarot coach, with gifts of clairsentience, clairaudience, and clairvoyance, inherited from her ancestors.
Good Grief: The A to Z Approach of Modern Day Grief Healing
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Category: On Writing
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