The Healer’S Workbook: Transforming Grief into Healing

By Stacey O'Brien

The Healers Workbook follows on from A kiss from an Angel, an inspirational journey through grief and the loss of a child. A story of courage and healing after the stillbirth of Gavin and Stacey OBriens first son, Finn in 2002.

Stacey turned grief into a gift of healing and has shared her journey with countless nurses, midwives and students of counselling, social work and mental health for over a decade.

Realizing the health industry needed the answers to the many questions she was being asked, Stacey created The Healers Workbook, a gift to the many warriors who serve their clients through their hardest and darkest days of grief, death and sickness.

A special gift of self care practices in this book ensures that many levels of healing and education will be gained so that our health industry can continue to benefit from the courage and caring hearts of the angels who care for us all when we need it the most.

Stacey will challenge you to make sure that you honour and care for yourself so that healing occurs on a daily basis.

Love and Healing to All.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Sep 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504304160

Stacey O'Brien

Stacey O’Brien transformed grief and the stillbirth of son Finn into the healing of her heart. Sharing an inspirational journey which helps nurture reconnection after a loved one has passed. Learning to feel them with our hearts instead of our hands and to hold them deeply in our every day.

Book preview

THANK YOU

In the years since writing A Kiss From An Angel I have done many talks around Australia at Hospitals to Midwives and Universities and Tafe Colleges to students of counselling, social work and nursing. From these talks The Healers Workbook has been born. I hope it is a helpful and healing tool for those on the front line, dealing with bereaved parents and their families and that it helps those beautiful and brave workers and carers to heal some of their own heartache that this job may create and bring up for them.

To all of these amazing soldiers of grief healing who I have met over the years I thank you and am so proud of you all for the fantastic work you do to heal people’s hearts. Thank you for your input and participation in our talks and for asking the tough questions which needed to be answered. I hope you find the guidance you need to support your work in these pages and that the self healing practices assist you in your own ongoing quest for healing yourself and your clients.

LOVE AND HEALING TO YOU ALL

At the beginning of A Kiss From An Angel I wrote a thank you dedicated to family and friends who had been there after Finn was born. I have included a chapter in this book about how I nearly removed this thank you when re-editing the e-book version, but decided to leave it as its own original entity, reflective of the time when it was written.

As you will read and as I have shared in many of my talks over the years it is important to acknowledge how others in our families and circle of friends can affect our healing process. Sometimes the very people who should be there are paralysed in their own grief and stuck unable to heal and move on. These are the very people your clients may be struggling to heal around.

I surprise myself on this day that after years of self healing I once again can thank my family for being so good at not helping and not speaking to me for years that they have helped ME HEAL ME!

Enough about the people who didn’t help and a massive Love filled thank you to the beautiful people who did.

The inspiration for this amazing A Kiss From An Angel and The Healer’s Workbook journey, is our beautiful first born son FINN, to you I owe the most rewarding job I’ve ever had, being your mum and turning pain into healing. You guide me through each day, helping me become the best me that I can be. You are a guardian angel to your little brother Kane and little sister Marney who fill our days with love, laughter and happiness and who treasure the presence of you in our family.

To Gav, my loving husband and partner in this journey of pain, grief and triumph, you have been my rock and an inspiration to fathers everywhere, sharing your struggle with emotions has allowed so many to heal. I’m so proud of you and your beautiful artwork and the amazing family we have created.

Also the beautiful healing friends who have filled my life with a sense of family when sometimes it didn’t seem close at all I LOVE YOU ALL and treasure the Love we have shared.

THANK YOU

LOVE AND HEALING

******If there is such a thing as Earth Angel’s (I believe there is)

******Then Nurses, Midwives, Doulas, Counsellors, Healers and Doctors who care for and heal the sick and dying on a daily basis should own the title for sure!

"Healing, when properly understood,

merely means casting a firm decision in the

direction of your Higher Self’s priorities"

—Doreen Virtue

WELCOME HEALERS

For choosing to hold this book in your hands, I thank you and would like to remind you of the beautiful healing soul you are. I invite you to re-read the title THE HEALER’S WORKBOOK and to empower yourself with these words. You are all amazing healers of grief and all those with heavy hearts that you work with, THANK YOU for your beautiful gift of healing.

It is important when working with grief to remind yourself of this special job you do, because sometimes it can be a very heavy one. We help people at their very lowest and sometimes never get to see that our efforts have resulted in a happier, healthier life for our clients, families and friends, while left wondering if we DID IT RIGHT.

Like many of you I am still learning my way through the minefield of grief and although not formerly trained I consider myself to have MASTERED my grief and the journey after the stillbirth of our first son, Finn.

For those of you who haven’t had the joy and healing experience of reading A Kiss From An Angel, please do yourself and your work a favour and read a copy. We share with you our journey through grief, how we coped, bonded and healed our hearts to be able to include Finn in our lives and our children’s lives daily without it being a painful reminder of loss and heartache. My wish is, that this is what you can help other grieving parents with and with the help of this book, you now have an angel on your side to help…Finn.

"Grief can be turned into power –

Because to have lived with grief is to have know love, a power that empowers us to teach others how to deal with grief and see beyond it"

Scott Alexander King – Animal Dreaming

Finns%27%20sketch.jpg

HAPPY 13TH BIRTHDAY FINN

IT HAS BEEN ALMOST ten years since I have written a book and it is with both excitement and urgency that I once again pick up my pen, woken from my sleep at 3.47am to write these words. It was just 24 hours ago that I pledged to a friend that I would like to gift this new book to Finn and the world for his 13th birthday in just 1 ½ months time. It is both cool and crazy to think that it’s 13 years, just as it is for any parent realising that the time has passed so quickly. It’s these similarities that I wish to share because I’ve been able to really enjoy the joy of not just birthing Finn, but the definite feeling that his beautiful soul is somehow still ageing with me and developing a more mature way of communicating than ever before.

I share this so that you are able to allow people the simple joy of continuing to develop their relationship with the passed soul they are missing rather than being stuck with just memories and painful feelings of loss and grief.

I, myself find that I stumble over the word LOSS these days, I don’t like lies and to me it definitely feels like a lie if I say I have LOST FINN. He clearly didn’t go anywhere. He is as big a part of my days and my life as my other 2 kids, Kane and Marney are. We work together, play together and dream together, just as it always has been, it’s just a matter of getting used to the physical contact touching your heart not your hands.

In saying that, I must share my pride and joy at being the mother of such a strong, handsome and confident teenager. The maturity