Topic of the Week Feel Your Life I’ve just come home from seeing the movie Rabbit Hole with Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart. It’s a beautiful film that helps to facilitate the healing power of grief. I highly recommend seeing it, especially if you need a good cleansing cry. While on the cruise, I had an opportunity to talk about the way in which grief connects us to our deepest self. When we are brave enough to feel the pain of loss, we open ourselves up to so much more – softness, the kindness of others, power that comes from anger, or a deeper, more exquisite love. We can gently encourage the process of grief by seeing a sad movie, talking with a friend who listens without commentary, or by reading the words of writers who have captured their own healing journey of loss and reclamation of self. On the cruise, I opened my keynote presentation with a poem from my friend, Nancy Levin, who has just published a book of poetry about the end of her marriage and the beginning of a new life. Her poems provoked much conversation on the cruise among people who were experiencing shifts in their relationships, and I thought I’d share one of them with you this week. The book is called: Writing for My Life…Reclaiming the Lost Pieces of Me, and it’s a beautiful catalyst for healing. Stop for a moment, take a slow, deep breath, and let the words flow through you… 
on the threshold of something new this is the summer of heart ache and goodbye i wake and lay in bed remembering all the things that will never happen all the places we will not go all the things we will not do the taste in my mouth is of a marriage crashing healing the past inside the present remains and relics embedded and intact a return and forward an arrival left alone in the dark we each must discover our own light the hope is killing me fear of being abandoned for any sort of weakness or not knowing what do you think you’ve done with all your feeling all this time this gets you in trouble interfering with decisions already in progress it’s the fear that makes you question not the faith constantly recreating the wounds of childhood until they heal seemingly stranded in the liminal this time between no longer and not yet no longer married and not yet divorced on the threshold of something new i made a promise that i cannot keep it will shock you how much it never happened | 
Week 7 – Valentine Love: A fun way to let others know they matter