Grief Work for Healthcare Providers topics include:

Module One ~ Self Assessment 

Defining grief in an overburdened health care system. Amy and Nicole will focus on grief, burnout, compassionate fatigue, and moral injury. What is grief and how does grief show up on the job? In one’s personal life? How are specific stresses, like the Covid-19 pandemic, highlighting and complicating the prior experience moral injury often associated with healthcare work? Amy and Nicole will provide statistics, a comprehensive framework of understanding, and lead participants through a self-assessment meditation wherein individuals can more clearly assess their baseline energy and how grief and overwhelm have transformed their work and life.

Module Two ~  The Physiology of Grief 

Exploring the impact of chronic stress associated with repeated encounters with grief on the human physiology is key. When a person’s nervous system is in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode, it is hard to feel and and nourish sustainable self care and empathy for self and others. Amy and Nicole will examine various definitions of self care and highlight how the energy of a courageous connection to our inner lives can be nourished. Self care is the foundation for integrating the grief encountered in healthcare work. How to ensure that self care survives times of chronic stress ~ and how to integrate practices that strengthen our capacity to hold space, while being connected to our inner strength, as we work? Finally, what suggestions for healthcare systems exist to strengthen the foundational supports to ensure health care providers don’t numb out, leave the field due to compassion-fatigue or attrition? How to implement policies that nurture and support empathy?

Module Three ~ Strengthening Inner Compassion 

Showing up with compassion vs. compassion fatigue. Building upon Module 2, Amy and Nicole will continue to explore sustainable models of compassion, especially in high stress environments. Can one show up for others, while maintaining a commitment to self care, in crisis after crisis without becoming numb? How does compassion fatigue impact our collective experience of health care? Amy and Nicole will lead participants through an examination of mindfulness exercises that help recharge an overwhelmed physiology ~ starting and rooted in compassion for one’s own sorrow, loss, grief, and self. For as we know, those that face/ integrate fear and grief, who learn from failure, and continue to nourish faith in the good are able to sustain the energies of self care as they move through crisis and loss.

Module Four ~ Transforming Suffering 

Transforming suffering, nourishing meaning making, and cultivating courage. In the final module, Amy and Nicole will lead participants through a series of inquiries that enable individuals to “re-open the heart” and find ways to transform their own personal and professional suffering through the conscious approach of holding space ~ being compassionately present to what is ~ and forging one’s path as we make meaning of truly difficult experiences. As we transform our suffering ~ “turn our pain into medicine” as the poet Rumi once wrote ~ we become beacons of courage in difficult times. We inspire others to cultivate their courage as they navigate the unknown. We draw upon the ancestral wisdom of healthcare providers who ennoble us with their example. We become what we can be ~ both personally and professionally ~ and we do this without shutting down or numbing ourselves along the way.

“All healing is first a healing of the heart.”

~ Carl Townsend

Nicole and Amy recommend all participants read Holding Space ~ On Loving, Dying, and Letting Go as this book is a source of inspiration for the workshop and will support participants in their journey of grief work.

“This book is like a superhero, showing us how to run bravely toward the darkness and come out the other side as a human being. Amy deserves not just praise for writing in gorgeous, clear prose, but deep thanks for creating a gentle guide we all need for that one thing no one escapes: death.”—Tina Cassidy, Birth  
 
“Holding Space does just that for each of us. In a clear, intimate voice, Amy Wright Glenn shares her own experience and wisdom and by doing so makes a space for her reader to develop the same. For anyone going through loss, this book will feel like a treasure.”
—Sharon Salzberg, Lovingkindness and Real Love

“Utilizing stories from her personal life and her experiences as a birth doula and a hospital chaplain, Amy reveals how we can keep our hearts open to both deep sorrow and ecstatic joy in these ‘sacred thresholds.’ You will find wisdom, love, and tenderness on every page of this very special book.”
—Henry Fersko-Weiss, Executive Director of the International End of Life Doula Association, Caring for the Dying