WELCOME to the Stillness Room.
This is a quiet place where your grief is welcome, where you can come for solace, or inspiration, for contemplation or healing.
Through prose, poetry, literature, conversation, music, art, nature and neuroscience, we’ll create a journey that allows you to honour your loss, reckon with it, heal and return to the world, transformed.
For many of us, grief can feel isolating. Whether grieving the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, declining health, the legacy of past trauma, anguish for our world, you can often feel quite alone.
The people around you may seem remote or unavailable. No-one seems willing to witness your suffering. You start to believe you’re doing it all wrong.
You are not alone.
About me…
The Stillness Room is a space I’ve created to explore the nature of grief and what it is to be human. I’m a certified grief educator, writer and business consultant.
In 1985, when I was 19, my parents and brother died in a boating accident. It is the cataclysm around which the rest of my life revolves. Much of my grieving has been in private; this life work is rarely acknowledged by those around us.
For many years I kept my grief buried under social norms and desire to belong. My search for meaning was kept on hold. I eventually learned to philosophise my loss and thought my grieving done.
Then, in my early 50s—a time of reckoning for many of us—my cultivated façade crumpled to expose a cavernous grief that had lain curled in on itself for decades.
I had nowhere to go but into my pain. And my only solace came from writing. Essays, short stories, open letters, journals. Through writing my way through suffering I learned that pain is greatest at the point of surrender. Once we yield, we are safe and can explore the nature of grief and the path to healing.
My experience led to the writing of a book—Between Two Waves—that explores my story and the nature of grief and healing.
I saw how reading my work was of great comfort to others I shared my book with. And I came to realise this was my life purpose—sharing what is most fragile and vulnerable and beautiful in me, and in each of us. And in connecting with others as they travel similar seas.
I created The Stillness Room to welcome others into a safe place to explore their own stories. If this is your first time here, welcome. I hope you stay a while. And I hope you will join the conversation and find your own way through whatever it is that brings you here. I trust this offers you a place of solace, inspiration, meaning and healing.
In my other life, I work with business leaders, delivering strategy and leadership retreats, advice and mentorship. I’m studying a Masters in Counselling. And I’m an iceberger and volunteer at our local life saving club.
Stillness Writers Room
Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o’er wrought heart and bids it break. Shakespeare, Macbeth
One of the most frequent reader comments I receive is ‘I’ve always thought I’d like to write about my grief…’
We all have stories that deserve to be told and deserve to be read. When we write our loss, or our pain, we find healing, in part because the process helps us reframe our losses, to create narratives around our experience, which can feel validating. It also allows us to craft something deeply painful into something of beauty. Something that honours our loss, and that also speaks to the intrinsic beauty of grief. And fundamentally, writing gives our loss words; words that we can’t seem to find when we speak. And this can feel profoundly healing.
And so the Stillness Writers Room will be an exclusive space for paid subscribers to connect with a supportive community, find inspiration and write their stories.
The Stillness Writers Room will include:
Weekly reflections & prompts
Monthly writing meets (on Zoom)
Quarterly 2.5-day online writers retreats (discounts for paid subscribers)
Why subscribe
I’m new here at Substack, and it’ll take a while to prepare a substantial œuvre. I wish to dedicated substantial time to writing, engaging in conversations and in creating a community.
Subscribe for free to get full access to the newsletter and publication archives.
Paid subscribers will have access to communities, conversations, workshops and exclusive access to the Stillness Writers Room.
Or feel welcome to make small contribution which will afford me more time to write and connect.
Or, if you’d prefer not to commit to subscription feel welcome to buy me a coffee and set your own price.
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