The Art of Healing Grief (BY INVITATION ONLY)

The Center for Health and Learning is pleased to offer a golden training opportunity for health care teams committed to addressing grief in medical settings. “The Art of Healing Grief,” a two-day workshop with a curriculum that employs the expressive arts as a significant part of treatment, will prepare your staff to more effectively support the emotional needs of the bereaved families they serve.

This training is designed for teams of 2-5 people, at least one of whom should be from a hospital setting. We encourage you to identify others in the community—a mental health practitioner or a Hospice volunteer—who would be interested in joining your staff in a collaborative effort that has been designed to carry beyond the workshop itself. After helping each team develop the applications, methods and materials needed to implement creative bereavement support in the community, the trainers will make themselves available until April 2007 to assist participants in achieving their goals.

The Creative Healing Approach used in this training utilizes art, movement, sound, guided visualization and writing. The Art of Healing Childhood Grief, the curriculum upon which this workshop is based, reflects years of research, development and training by Anne Black and Penelope Simpson, who in 1990 founded HEALS (Healing Expressive Arts Loss Support). Weaving theory with practice in grounded, practical ways, this user-friendly resource contains everything needed to implement an effective bereavement program.

Participants in “The Art of Healing Grief” will return to their home communities with a set of tools uniquely designed to help people access and express painful feelings occasioned by the loss of a loved one or by the need to adjust to a chronic or life-threatening situation. Whether the context is natural death, suicide or homicide, disaster or an act of terrorism, each participant will receive significant support in remaining a compassionate presence during times of sudden and traumatic loss.